GAS-L: Re: San Francisco Bay Area is Banning Masonry He

[Reedtb2@cs.com]

Dear Thomas Stubbing et al:

Here at the Colorado School of Mines we agree with your "Biomass Based Noah's 
Ark" warning.

Incidentally, an EXCELLENT book on Noah's flood by ? Ryan tells in 
geological/archeological/anthropological/classical literature detail the 
reasons why the flood occured 5600 (?) years ago when the Mediteranean broke 
through the Bosphorus straights and filled a neary empty Black Sea basin 
around which civilications had been forming. The shoreline retreated at 1-2 
miles/day, enough to drown most inhabitants and give the rest something to 
tell their grandchildren about.  

I hope we don't have such stories to tell our grandchildren ( I have 7) of 
the exhaustion of cheap fossil fuels.

Yours truly,                    TOM REED 

In a message dated 5/26/00 8:03:52 AM Mountain Daylight Time, 
heat-win@cwcom.net writes:

> 
>       WHY WE NEED A FORESTRY BASED NOAH’S ARK
>  
>       Within a lengthy paper dated 29th March 2000 on the subject of global
>       energy supply William E. Rees, an ecological economist and professor
>       at the University of British Columbia's School of Community and
>       Regional Planning wrote the following:
>  
>       "The world is running out of oil. Recent price hikes are mere tremors
>       heralding the real price shock to come.
>  
>       Oil "production" (i.e., extraction) peaked in North America in 1984.
>       Several recent studies project world oil production to peak by 2013
>       or sooner, possibly as soon as 2007.  Even the necessarily
>       conservative International Energy Agency in its World Energy Outlook,
>       1998 concurred for the first time that global output could top out
>       between 2009 and 2012 and decline rapidly thereafter.  IEA data
>       project a nearly 20-per-cent shortfall of supply relative to demand
>       by 2020 that will have to be made up of from "unidentified
>       unconventional" sources (i.e., known oil-sands deposits have already
>       been taken into account).  Other studies show that by 2040 total oil
>       output from all sources may fall to less than half of today's 25-26
>       billion barrels of oil per year.
>  
>       And running out of oil is not running out of just oil. Oil is the
>       means by which industrial society obtains (and overexploits) all
>       other resources.  The world's fishing fleets, its forest sector, its
>       mines, and its agriculture all are powered by liquid portable fossil
>       fuels -- 17 per cent of the U.S. energy budget, most of it oil, is
>       used just to grow, process, and transport food alone.  Keep in mind
>       too that petroleum is not just a fuel. Oil and natural gas are the
>       raw material for medicines, paints, plastics, agricultural
>       fertilizers and pesticides.  Since oil is directly or indirectly a
>       part of everything else, the scarcity of oil and the coming price
>       shock means higher prices all round.
>  
>       Some economists argue that rising prices enable us to exploit less
>       accessible deposits, that the resource is "constantly renewed as it
>       is extracted."  This is grossly misleading. The physical stock of
>       exploitable oil is not being "renewed." Improved technology has
>       simply made a dwindling supply more accessible.  Abundant short-term
>       market supplies then effectively short-circuit the price increases
>       that would otherwise signal impending real scarcity, even as finite
>       stocks are depleted.
>  
>       Moreover, oil exploration is very much subject to diminishing
>       material returns. Despite increasing effort, we currently discover
>       less than six billion barrels of new oil a year, not even a quarter
>       of present consumption.  In much of the world, oil extractors used to
>       discover 50 barrels of oil for every barrel consumed in drilling and
>       pumping.  Today the ratio is five to one, heading to one for one by
>       2005. At that point, there will no point in extracting oil at any
>       price even though plenty will be left in the ground.
>  
>       What about substitutes?  The fact is that no suitable substitutes are
>       yet in sight for the fossil fuels used in heavy farm machinery,
>       construction and mining equipment, diesel trains and trucks, and
>       ocean-going freighters.  Jet aircraft cannot be powered by
>       electricity, whatever its source.  It is also no small irony that we
>       need high-intensity fossil fuel to produce the machinery and
>       infrastructure required for most alternative forms of energy.
>       Sunlight is simply too "dilute" to use in manufacturing the high-tech
>       devices and equipment required for its own conversion to heat and
>       electricity. Industrial civilization faces a paradox: we need oil to
>       move beyond the age of oil.
>  
>       The human population has grown six-fold in less than 200 years.  The
>       global economy has quintupled in less than 50.  No factor has played
>       a greater role in the explosive growth of the human enterprise than
>       abundant, cheap fossil fuel.  No other resource has changed the
>       structure of economies, the nature of technologies, the balance of
>       geopolitics, and the quality of human life as much as petroleum.
>       Little wonder that some scientists believe that passing the peak of
>       world oil production will be a shock to the human enterprise like no
>       other event in history.  Population and consumption are still on a
>       steep trajectory but the rocket is running out of fuel."
>  
>       Noah built his ark before the flood.  Today we need to build an ark
>       by planting trees and other energy crops and constructing the
>       facilities needed to produce solid and liquid fuels from them before
>       the oil needed to do so runs out.  If we wait it will be too late!
>  
>  I hope this helps.
>  
>  Regards,
>  
>  Thomas J Stubbing
>  Heat-Win Limited
>  Ludlow, UK
>  
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