Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Bell
As Bot pointed out, oil is finite. And there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that we've hit peak production. Most of the huge oil fields throughout the world are declining, Canterell, North Sea, Gawawar, North Slope of Alaska, Venezeula. Currently the world is pumping about 85 million barrels of oil a day. We will probably never be able to pump more than that, and output will begin to decline in the not to distant future. Yet we continue to pour billions into "transportation" projects that amount to nothing but building more roads instead of looking for better more effiecient way to move people. Much of Hussiens stimulus bill will continue to spend billions on a transportaiton system that is likly to be obsolute in the not to distant future. By the way did you get the phrase "great disruption" from Kunstler?
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Unless you think we are destined for personal aircraft in the near future, roads will be used even if cars don't burn gas anymore. And good luck trying to force everyone onto some mass transit system that doesn't use roads. Americans have proven that they like to get around in their own vehicles at their own convenience.
Or are you suggesting people will no longer need/desire to travel in the near future?
The point of the article as I see it is that we may be facing a paradigm shift. Our model may have proven to be wrong. It took 50 years, but maybe the business community is wrong. This is a different point than one of viewing the current crisis as a normal downturn of normal (albeit aided) market fluctuation. Perhaps this is not a depression, but an indication of failure. To me that is a much more interesting point.