Tens of millions of cats to face slow death by freezing

[Dogmudgeon]

Oil and natural gas are about to get very expensive. Is anybody paying attention?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html

Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.

The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are the ones produced by the US department of energy, which claims that this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information agency has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has based its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand, perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial markets.

Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010. In August, the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he was "99% confident" that the date of maximum global production will be 2004. Even if the optimists are correct, we will be scraping the oil barrel within the lifetimes of most of those who are middle-aged today.

The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will not. Today we will burn 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels a day, after which projected demand accelerates. If supply declines and demand grows, we soon encounter something with which the people of the advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage. The price of oil will go through the roof.

--bkl
Meow.

[LARED]

1. Build nukes

Now

Or we could just burn the millions and millions of cats for heat

(just joking)

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Not enough fissile material

Even without the post-TMI regulations, we only have enough for about another decade or two of "cheap" energy at our historic 2.5% per year growth rate. Fusion is the Energy of the Future, and will be for as long as anyone can guess.

Cats would be a more efficient source of energy if we harnessed them and got them running on a treadmill. Burning them is so wasteful!

--bkl

[Demonaut]

3. methane

eat more beans, no really there are huge deposits of methane off many coastal waters...just need a paln to extract it.

[Dogmudgeon]

5. Coastal methane = about a year's supply

Nope, the situation is really quite dire.

We could have started planning for it back around 1975, but we didn't.

I think what we need is massive investment in developing renewable energy sources AND to start moving heavy industry off-planet.

But that's just me.

--bkl

[indigo32]

4. Uggh

I've heard this before... but whenever I'm reminded I get chills down my spine. No wonder we bury our heads in the sand. But if we really want to I know we can come up with some sort of solution.

Poor Kitties.