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General News    H3'ed 8/5/12

Hell on Earth

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Most importantly, this deceptive statistic leaves out the very different EROEI's of each energy substance. "EROEI" stands for "Energy Returned on Energy Invested." Conventional oil, such as that found in West Texas and Saudi Arabia, has an EROEI of about 100 to 1. That means that for one barrel of oil's worth of energy expended in production, you get back 100 barrels of petroleum--a gain of 99 times over the initial energy investment.   But the conventional oil being discovered today is closer to 10:1 with respect to EROEI, due to the greater difficulty in producing it. In essence, all of the "low hanging fruit" of easy to get oil has already been gotten. What remains is progressively harder to get.

Unconventional oils such as tar sands, oil shales, fracking-produced oil and natural gas possess EROEI's of closer to 3:1, or even worse. They cannot substitute for the much higher net energy oils they are replacing.

So the net energy available is actually decreasing, even though the total numbers of barrels of oil equivalent ("BOE") is alleged to be slowly increasing. With tax incentives and legions of gullible investors, it is still possible to make a paper "profit" off of these unconventional substances for the time being, even though they do little to address our underlying energy deficiencies.

This decline in net energy is actually the ultimate cause of the economic disturbances intensifying through the world and national economies. They are based upon debt with the expectation that expanding future wealth will pay of today's debts. Given long term economic contraction in the future, today's debt becomes ever more worthless. And so economies teeter towards inevitable collapse.

So let's step back and look at the big picture here. Due to their unalloyed short-term greed, energy corporations are heavily investing in mining and refining these unconventional, low EROEI, hydrocarbon sources. This adds greatly to the rate at which CO2 is released into the atmosphere. It also adds greatly to the overall quantity of CO2 released. Additionally, as this utterly irrational CO2 buildup occurs, it ensures that our national and global economy will collapse in the near term future as its fundamental assumption of ever greater wealth production in the future ("growth") is violated. This vastly reduces our ability to deal systematically with the CO2 buildup as everyone tries to look out for themselves.

And, by the way, that net increase of CO2, according to Dr. Hansen, makes a runaway greenhouse effect INEVITABLE.

Instead of using our fossil energy reserves to rapidly and methodically transition away from fossil fuels, we are literally burning them up to get at ever lower-net-energy reserves of fossil fuels. Energy companies do this because it is all they know how to do. Our politicians remain silent, or actually enable this, because they are paid by energy lobbyists to do so .

The handful of corporate conglomerates which own nearly all our mass media are evidently too busy reporting on Kim Kardashian's latest foibles to take the time and trouble to report seriously and in depth about climate change, except for their manufactured "controversy" on whether or not climate change is real at all. The result is that misinformed and uninformed people do nothing, and the overall system accelerates to utter absolute and eternal doom. This is where we are right now.

We can't tell when, but unless we fundamentally change our ways, sometime relatively soon the process of warming will become unstoppable. We will then have a short while to reflect upon out utter folly before we all horribly and painfully die. Earth becomes uninhabitable for us long before the oceans actually begin to boil.

If that were as far as it went, I would see poetic justice at work. However, what we are about to do is to EXTERMINATE ALL MULTICELLULAR LIFE ON EARTH FOREVER!

Think about that: every tree, every bird, every fish in the sea, turtles, monkeys, dogs, cats--ALL LIFE, gone FOREVER.

There are no words to describe the magnitude of such an evil. And we are the perpetrators. If we fail to act decisively, and quickly to put a stop to this, we shall surely be dammed to the lowest circle of hell--and deservedly so. And our self-made Hell will be right here on Earth.

Realize that our oligarchic (rule by the rich) political system CANNOT deal effectively with this problem. The same persons who are causing the climate change are profiting immensely by their rapine of the environment, and they have bought off the political system and largely control our mass media as well. Democrats, Republicans, the various dominant political parties and factions elsewhere around the world--all are part of the problem rather than the solution.

Then where to start? Start with yourself. Localize, become as self-sufficient as possible. Cooperate with others of like mind in your communities. A critical mass of aware people will be reached. Then decisive actions will come very swiftly--hopefully, more swiftly than our impending annihilation. One can hope.

Or just ignore the warnings, dismiss them as alarmist, don't worry, be happy, and await your fate ".

At the deepest level our impending self-inflicted demise comes about because we are basically just very clever apes. An ape can prune a small branch and insert it into a termite mound thereby obtaining a tasty snack. With our even larger brains we can insert a pipe into the earth and obtain the energy of a half-billion years of stored sunlight. We are intelligent. What we are not however is wise. We do not consider the long term consequences of our actions. We do not consider the overall effects of our actions on the wider human and natural systems in which they are embedded. Professor Ugo Bardi has defined this mental attribute as sapience .

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Michael P Byron is the author of The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad. This book is a manual for taking effective action to deal with the crises of our age including (more...)
 
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