Thats just wonderfull that we celabrate the use of the biggest poluting products of the century. Oil is King
Cheers

I celebrate oil and gas week in BC everytime I get bent over at the pumps and pay my Natural gas bill!

Payed 89.9 for diesel the other day in Beaverlodge Alberta.

Retired take away oil and what do have left. Your quality of life, everything you see and touch involves oil. What is your solution?

seamutt do u get paid by the oil and gas industry?

No but Gore has made 300 million off the scam. So what do you think shut down all oil?

Yeah, Victoria celebrates everything that the North supplies but they turn thier backs on us when we want some of it back.

Come on supertech, you must be used to it like the rest of us to get nothing back from this government.

1.4 trillion barrels of oil is what the total proven reserves are. At the current world rate of use, which is 97.2 million barrels per day, we have roughly 40 years left to switch to alternate fuels.

More importantly, that will have to transition over a long period in order for the transition to happen relatively painlessly.

40 years is not a long period. It will get more and more painful by the year.

8 countries have about 80% of the proven reserves.

Saudi Arabia 19.21%
Canada 12.83%
Iran 9.91%
Iraq 8.28%
Kuwait 7.49%
Venezuela 7.16%
United Arab Emirates 7.05%
Russia 5.69%

The top five consumers make up 50% of the consumption

United States 19.2%
European Union 14.1%
China 8.4%
Japan 4.5%
India 3.1%

Canada is 11th at 2.2%

If it ain't global warming that is going to get us, then it is global inability to switch from oil in time.

As I keep saying on here, it really does not matter whether one believes in global warming is influenced to a significant degree by humans, getting rid of the dependency on oil is a must if there are not to be some radical changes facing those who are now going out into the working world.

Anyone who is not prepared to give that serious consideration is totally ignorant. The fewer of those we have amongst us, the better off we will be in the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

If someone wants to provide a serious argument to the approximate projections of "peak oil", please go ahead.

Attacking the person will not suffice to win the debate.

"everything you see and touch involves oil"

My eyes do not see without light. There are many sources of light, the sun being the greatest source of light and energy.

We have long since given up using oil or gas for streetlights. We use electricity to provide us with light these days. We also use electricity to power trains, urban transit, and now automobiles.

A transition from oil and gas to alternate fuels does not happen overnight. The more option we have, the more the new technologes can be tested over time and the longer our oil and gas resources will last.

Let us look where other countries, for instance, are with just windpower, a source of energy used for thousands of years by farmers and ships.

For comparison the WAC Bennett dam generates 2.7 gigawatts and the site C proposal would generate 0.9 gigawatts.

The USA generates 35 gigawatts through wind power, number one in the world as of 2009. China moved to second with 25.8 gigwatts and Germany is third with 25.7 gigawatts.

China's goal is to develop a 150gigawatt wind energy capacity by 2020. And we know what China is capable of when they set such a goal for themselves. Guess where we will be buying the technology from.

Anyone who is not prepared to give that serious consideration is totally ignorant. The fewer of those we have amongst us, the better off we will be in the future.

Well Gus there you go again. I guess I’m just ignorant. Climate change has been going on for thousands of years, Some times dramatic and at times hardly noticeable. And do we really know how much is natural and how much we contribute to that change. Too me the big question is not can we adapt but rather can my Grand kids survive the greed that’s embedded in our social fabric today.

There is one major difference between the optimists that we have today and the reality of tomorrow. We had a wake up call in 2009 and its not over yet. Makes one wonder who is ignorant in this scenario.
Cheers

I don't believe in the doom and gloom scenario of peak oil either. Likely as not, we haven't even scratched the surface in finding new oil deposits. Or in ways to greatly improve the efficiency of engines powered by oil-based fuels.

Additionally, there's been recent evidence that several supposedly worked out and abandoned oilfields may be replenishing, and that the long held theory that oil is formed from the concentrated decay of ancient lifeforms is not true ~ that oil instead is formed from continual reactions within the earth's molten core and seeps upwards towards the surface.

There have been rumours around since at least the late 1920's that "Big Oil" has repeatedly bought up and suppressed any patentable inventions that would improve the thermal efficiency of gasoline as a motor fuel. I believe at least some of those rumours are based on fact.

If oil resources were as truly limited as we've been led to believe, would we still be shipping raw materials halfway around the world to have them processed, and then bringing the finished products the same distance back again to be sold? And claim that this is somehow "cheaper" to do than making the same finished products here?

How, physically speaking, can it ever be "cheaper"?

Look at the tremendous waste of energy that's involved in doing this alone. There's your real source of pollution from burning up oil, when you look at the sheer scale of which this is now done.

Driving that smoke-belching old clunker back and forth to work every day, or heating a house with single pane windows with a thirty year old oil furnace pales in comparison ~ even if we ALL did that.

Retired .... you did not read again. Sorry, but I cannot control what you are doing and not doing. That is entirely up to you.

I am saying that we are running out of one of the fuels used that some say is a cause of climate change. Whether it is part of the cause of global warming in the current cycle of warming does not even have to be debated.

As far as recessions and depressions go, no big deal. My parents went through the second world war in the middle of the major actions. On the other side of the globe, people had atomic bombs dropped on them.

Many of us on here grew up during the cold war when the clock was close to midnight and the young population was scared half out of their wits when they were taught how to protect themselves by huddling under plywood desks.

Global depression is nothing. People's lifestyle will change for a relatively short period of time, but they will still survive.

Wars are avoidable, depressions are avoidable, running out of fuel is avoidable, pestilence is avoidable.

But, to answer socredible's notion that we would never transport stuff halfway around the world just to assemble it and then send it back if we were low on transportation fuel, that assumes that the world acts as one. If it did, then those other things mentioned would never happen.

In fact, we are driven by competition from the start of the human species, the same as all the other animals on this planet.

The only difference is that we know it.

BUT, we can also see that does not actually make us smarter since we would long ago have developed that short work week or work year and enjoyed a life with considerably more leasure ... :-)

Then again, that could be the real "hell on earth", wandering around in the Utopia of social networking or whatever floats one's boat.

One of the many articles on the met about abiotic carbon based fuelhttp://dailyduck.blogspot.com/2006/03/debunking-abiotic-theory-of-petroleum.html

Hazard = running out of oil/natual gas/coal as a fuel within 50 years with a peak in 10 years

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the worst case scenario of death of civilization as we have known it? I'll say a 5.

Risk = likelyhood of that happening, that is the probability of finding substantial new sources that will allow us to continue to rely on those fuels for at least another 100 years at a minimum

I say 9.5.

I put it that low because of substatnial "tar sands" and shale finds that may still happen. Geologists would, of course, be able to give that a more reasonable probability.

The likelyhood that there will be substantial finds of abiotic carbon based fuels is pretty low from what I can tell based on the little discussion there is about that.

So, do we want to be safe? Or do we want to start doing the analagous "hiding under desks" again?

We know we can play it considerably safer and build our technology around alternate fuels, safe energy, etc. etc.

We are following that path, although it needs to be sped up as far as I can tell.

So, I am voting not to risk civilization as I know it and as I would want my children and grandchildren to know it. I see no down side in following a path I see as the more prudent one.

The world may not yet act as one, Gus, but that's what the powers that be have been busily trying to achieve all through our, our parents, and our grandparents lives, if not longer.

There is an ongoing quest for a "One World Government", but it will not be a democracy in any true sense of that often mis-used word.

And it will not be for the purpose of making "life more abundant" for all the world's peoples, but rather just the opposite. For it will maintain its rule through creating scarcity where there really is, or was, none.

It can easily be witnessed in the community in which I live, where just this year the Regional District and Municipalities have erected large signs, along the lines of the same ones the Forest Service uses to warn of the risk of forest fire.

The ones with the multi-coloured squares with a moveable indicator arrow pointing at a particular colour for Low right through to Extreme.

Only in this case the arrow is pointing to a square indicating the level of water restriction then in place, Stage 1, Stage 2, or Stage 3. The object obviously being to impress upon us that water is now a scarce resource, and we can only continue to exist if we ration it as ordered, and pay still more for the priviledge.

Thanks to the internet, I understand this has suddenly become a world-wide problem. Strange, how that's happened, everywhere, all at once. Where'd all that water go?

Also strange is that there is never a suggestion from the same clique pushing this rationing that if water is now so scarce and precious maybe they should completely disallow all the number of new subdivisions that routinely come before them each year for approval.

After all, if water here is really now so wanting, why are they still inviting half the world to come live in a place where there's already such a deficiency? And their coming will only make it worse. If there really IS a deficiency, that is.

And so it is with oil. There are literally oceans of it under the earth. Still. And like those diamond mines in the Northwest Territories were but a few years ago, completely unknown until someone thought to look for diamonds there.

But the supply of oil is controlled, just as the supply of diamonds is, by a cartel. And their object is to keep the price up. And they're good at doing just that, with considerable assistance from those we elect.

I guess I will just put you down for another one of those conspiracy theorists, socredible.

No longer so credible in my eyes, that is for sure.

On person, one vote democracy is a fallacy. Never really existed in any country of reasonable size. There has always been a class which has not been allowed a vote - females, slaves, youth, foreigners, etc.

Today's democracies are that only by representatives. Once they get elected, they do as they see fit. If they APPEAR to do it well, they get re-elected. Rarely do they get elected for what they think. Typically, they get elected for what their political association thinks. Blame and accolades are attached to the group or the group's leaders, not the individuals.

Not a democracy at all.

The brainwashing that has gone on in society to get people to associate with groups rather than thinking for themselves is readily visible on blogs such as this where the independent thinkers can be counted on the fingers of one person's hands.