It has to be said. This guy is simply lazy, and did not do the research necessary to have informed opinions.

Here are the facts I gathered in about 5 minutes. (Its pretty sloppy research, but hey-- I'm just posting a comment!)

1) Electric grid transmission efficiency: ~90%

http://www.energetics.com/gridworks/grid.html

2) Internal Combustion Engine Efficiency: ~20%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine#Ener...

3) Power Plant Efficiency: ~33%

http://cleantechnica.com/2008/06/26/electricity-generation-e...

4) Battery Efficiency: ~80%

http://xtronics.com/reference/batterap.htm

33 * .9 * .8 = 23.76

23.76 > 20

If we could produce endless supplies of cheap renewable energy, it would be a no-brainer to switch to electric cars.

http://www.evworld.com/library/Tesla_21centuryEV.pdf

http://www.psnh.com/Business/SmallBusiness/Motor.asp

I don't know about converters, or what 'etc' is... (I'd guess you are more qualified than me to factor that in-- any estimate?)

You don't connect them directly to the battery pack, though. You need "something" in-between (power electronics) to drive the motor. I'd estimate the efficiency of such a controller to be around 80/90%.

Good lord, did I really consider this guy a luminary in my teens? I am ashamed.

We need wackos like Stallman. He's a little south of sanity, but damn, he's slung a lot of code and really changed the landscape of technology with his idealism.

OSS ESR has been involved in or founded:

Fetchmail, GPSd, CML2, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Jargon File, Terminfo/Termcap, VC Mode/GUB in Emacs (ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS), Contribs to Gnuplot, Gnome, Python, Groff and Nethack, GNU Toolkit SED, Hexdump, gif2png, Bogofilter, Countless Howtos at the LDP

With the exception of the above, you're right he's not contributed much to OSS. I'm not saying ESR's not a polarising person (I've met both ESR and RMS, both can be black and white people) but he has contributed a lot to OSS.

The one claim that stood out there -- the one that gave a really testable statement that would have surprised me if true was, "ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS". I thought, hey, there'd be a surprise, so I decided to run cvstat on the emacs lisp subdir:

  - RMS contributed the 2nd most code to Emacs' Lisp with 217542 lines of changes.
  - ESR contributed the 39th most code to Emacs' Lisp with 6367 lines of changes.

I've talked to him. It's amusing. And inspiring. And a little frustrating. At least as of a couple years ago he'd still interrupt you every single time you said "Linux" to stick a "GNU" in there.

Why do you refer to Stallman as a wacko? Why do you accuse him of being insane?

I would love to read the opinion of someone trained in human mental health care insofar as Stallman's mental health is concerned.

That's a long list, but most of them are toys, scripts or quick hacks. Even the ones that almost look significant at first glance -- i.e. bogofilter or sed -- not so much.

His version of bogofilter was 900 lines of code and his version of sed 1700. I'd guess that the total amount of code that he's written that gets packaged for a standard Linux distribution is maybe 5k LOC. That's being generous, honestly. And that's what I find disingenuous when he's busy talking about his prolific OSS background.

The comments about Stallman's sanity weren't meant to be taken literally. I assumed that was obvious.

"And no, electric cars aren’t the answer either; the power to run them has to come from somewhere. The best case is that people will charge them off the grid at night. This will require power plants to be burning just as much additional fuel as if the cars themselves were doing it, perhaps more given transmission losses." --ESR

"Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculates that there is enough excess nighttime generating capacity nationwide to charge 84 percent of the 198 million cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road today. Ideally, the energy charging those cars would come from carbon-free sources, which would reduce almost to zero the greenhouse gas emissions per mile. But a joint study by Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that even if a plug-in vehicle got all its electricity from coal-fired plants (the U.S. electricity grid is about 50 percent coal), it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car. Over the next thirty years, the study concluded, widespread adoption of V2G could eliminate 450 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of retiring a third of the current fleet." From Earth: The Sequel (p. 226)

This only means no new power plants. The current ones would have to step up production at night.

> it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car

2/3 isn't significantly different than 1 as far as I'm concerned. Especially when were talking about what goes into making the batteries.

Without clean grid electricity, electric cars are merely a feel-good way of outsourcing the problem.

I realize that. However, also realize that wind power is running at peak production during the night, which is when people would be charging their cars. Also realize the 2/3 number was for if 100% of the power was coming from coal, which it obviously wouldn't be.

How much power in the US is generated by wind?

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

However, it accounts for about a third of all new electricity production. You have to remember that a cap-and-trade bill is going to be what makes both V2G and renewable energy profitable, so if it becomes profitable to build V2G cars then it will also be profitable to increase wind capacity. I forgot that solar thermal is also an excellent candidate for creating electricity at night, since you can store excess hot water very efficiently during the day and then use a small amount of natural gas to make sure it's at the optimally efficient temperature to spin the turbines.

No. Here is the Wikipedia quote: "Wind power accounted for 35% of all new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2007." (Emphasis mine.) Capacity is not production. Capacity-factor helps us understand how much production we can expect from a given capacity. Here are the capacity-factors of two recently-installed wind turbines:

http://www.hullwind.org

  Sept 25, 2008              Hull 1       Hull 2
                             660 KW       1.8 MW       

  Total Generation - kWhs  10,262,150    8,127,391 

  Days Commissioned          2464           877 
  Hours generating          39,050        14,050 
  Capacity Factor            26.3%         21.5%

1/3 is quite a lot in that respect.

Checking the study in question (first hit for 'study "Electric Power Research Institute" "Natural Resources Defense Council"'), it seems they did _not_ take into account the production and maintenance costs of each type of vehicle.

I'm skeptical of technologies that promise incremental conservation through massive consumption of other resources (battery material).

To quote E:TS again:

"Without any major breakthroughs, vehicles that are little different from today's could use one-third the energy per mile, says John DeCicco, Environmental Defense Fund's specialist in automotive strategies. That alone would radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If those cars ran on a biofuel made from renewable feedstocks with one-fourth the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of today's gasoline (Amyris's biogasoline, for instance, or Verenium's cellulosic ethanol), then the emissions per mile would be one-twelfth what they are today, a reduction of 92 percent. It was the feasibility of such options that, in September 2007, caused Vermont U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions to reject manufacturers' challenges and rule that they could meet California's new standards, requiring carbon dioxide emissions in new cars to be cut about 22 percent in the first phase (2009 through 2012) and 30 percent in the mid-term phase (2013 to 2016). Given the expected doubling by midcentury of vehicle miles traveled in the United States, however, California and the rest of the country will have to go much further--reducing automobile emissions about 80 percent." (p. 229)

The book lists a whole boatload of other ways to save massive amounts of energy with today's technology, many of which are listed in my notes of chapter 9: http://alexkrupp.com/earth.html

The sections on weather prediction, clean cement, carpeting, and fans are insanely cool.

...

"Another innovation came in the carpet pattern itself. The company's top-selling pattern, called Entropy, mimics the disorder of a forest floor with its strewn leaves, pebbles, and twigs. That randomness means that the pattern needn't match up from tile to tile, but can be laid out in any direction, eliminating the huge amounts of scrap normally generated at installation. It means few tiles are rejected at the factor: imperfections get lost in the wandering variations of color. It also means the carpet lasts a long time, because worn or stained tiles can be swapped out without replacing the rest." (p. 215)

Sounds like a good book.

But I'm sure he is useful to society. We're all unique snowflakes.

Sure. You can gauge a hacker's grip on reality based on what specific year they stopped taking him seriously. One does not get granularity that fine very often. Few people spend a day a week composing more and more whacky odes to junk science and more and more possessed rants against the cultural tapestries of entire continents. Even fewer people manage to slowly but consistently rack it up over the better part of a decade. Every field should get itself some Raymond or other, really.

Now excuse me while I go sip some latte, nibble some brie, and appease to some Islamofascists with my fellow Idiotarians.

http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20040.htm

http://www.sspi.gatech.edu

A book, "Silent Power", summarizing the work of the SSPW to date will be published here.

Chapter One "Climate Change - Nutritional Impacts" explains how the food we eat is slowly changing due to rising CO2

http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/chapter1.pdf

From that .pdf:

In one important study, Dr. Clenton Owensby and colleagues, studied ruminants grazing in a FACE range with a doubled CO2 level on Kansas’ grassy rangelands. Their studies into the impact of increasing carbon dioxide on those rangelands revealed a surprising effect. The grass these animals foraged from the FACE range had less nitrogen and correspondingly less protein. The protein content and digestibility, even by the four highly efficient stomachs of ruminants, was reduced at increased CO2 level.

There's at least one startup working on this:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/altarock-breaks-new-g...

Apparently, with advances in drilling technology, and developing the tech to fracture hot dry rock could greatly expand the range of possible geothermal sites.

There is a lot of new technologies discussed and I for one would like more information so I can make an informed evaluation. This post doesn't provide it.

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

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

The "atmosphere tower" might be the convection "energy tower":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_tower_%28downdraft%29

One of the points raised in the post that I didn't quite understand was tidal power being presented (although it isn't explicitly stated) as though it isn't time variable. The last time I checked the tide went in and then out twice a day. You can trap it in a reservoir and then slowly release it but there are going to be periods when it generates no power.

Why not use pumped storage? What is needed is elevation to overcome the head-deficiency inherent to the equilibrium periods. This is achievable by sacrificing some of the stored water, to pump a smaller amount of water to a higher elevation.

The only difference I can see being that with tidal you know exactly when the next burst of energy will come and how large it will be.

And it's not "fairly well established". Not in any way that one would deem scientific. It's fairly well established in the minds of bigots and in the minds of people who are looking to justify their denial of rights to certain groups of people, but it's not established in any meaningful way.

For example, take a look at the body of evidence showing that the earth is round. Now, using the same SCIENTIFIC criteria, show me the evidence that people of African descent are less intelligent than people of european descent - you'll find that the 'studies' that were done are very fuzzy, very open to intepretation, use very skewed sample size, and are not pure at all.

What you are really trying to say is that In tests conducted in the 70s with tiny groups of African-American people of mixed race, who came from long disadvantaged communities, there was a difference in problem solving ability according to a certain metric, compared to affluent children from educated homes.

The evidence is weak and very unscientific. If you REALLY want to prove that the IQ is lower, then I demand sample groups approaching 2000, I demand that the tests be taken in Africa, and written in an African language, I demand that the socio-economic backgrounds of the participants be the same or similar, and I demand that all questions related to verbal ability be removed from IQ tests.

IQ has not been measures properly, and having lived in several continents, nothing I have seen indicates to me that there is any significant difference in IQ between people living on different continents, once you factor in their family background.

But people like you once found a study that fitted in with your narrow perception, and you hang on to it like it was the holy grail. It's flawed, and it's an argument similar to creationism.

What if family background is ignored?

  .

How's this?:

http://www.amazon.com/Clocking-Mind-Chronometry-Individual-D...

it appears that the variance [IQ subtests] share can be reliably and accurately indexed by reaction time on a task where subjects must merely press a lighted button. The correlations between such simple tasks and g is around .62, which is higher than the correlation between many subscales of IQ tests and the g factor to which they contribute.

  .

Is that what you gleaned from studying those two books (both listed as ISI Citation Classics)?

http://www.google.com/search?q=citation+classic+arthur+jense...

I mean what's your point? What do you hope to gain by telling me that people like me are less intelligent than people like you? And how do you think it makes me feel to read that?

The point you're missing by interpreting our statements as personal attacks is that we're talking about group mean differences. And the reason this is relevant is that for the past 40 years in the United States, inequality of outcome has been taken as evidence of inequality of opportunity (i.e., lower average African-American and Hispanic educational/economic achievement is evidence of discrimination by whites), thereby justifying affirmative action and other forms of income redistribution. This is a perfectly reasonable conclusion if you assume that all races have an equal distribution of cognitive abilities. What we're trying to say is that this assumption is unfounded.

Errm...doesn't the fact that transmission is less than 100% efficient just multiply up the gain? If I lose 50% of power sending it to a house, if that house saves Y kwH, I need to generate 2Y less kwH? i.e. the worse the transmission %, the more effect I get from efficiency at the point of use?

Or did I miss his point?

It makes sense but only if you confuse efficiency and demand. Increased efficiency should decrease demand assuming all other things are equal. Surprisingly all other things aren't equal.

Well, the demand generally increases over time, so efficiency just means you can delay building that next 100MW plant in the US a while longer - which is useful.

I agree with his basic point that "a dense form of energy is useful for transport". But he doesn't seem to have much beyond that.

He also neglects the point that turning power -> useful work done is more efficient for electricity from a battery, which is pretty relevant. And for fuels, is more efficient in bigger engines/power plants.

Wikipedia tells me diesel engines get in the region of 45% efficient, petrol 30%, electric 90%.

That's a lot of room for transmission loss.

The key is that not everyone needs that kind of power. Most of the people here in Texas running around in work trucks would be just fine with one of those little euro coupe utility vehicles that's as small as a compact car. It's only in a minority of cases where you need the heavy hauling capability of even an F-150.

So can compressed air. If you look at household electricity usage, an enormous amount is taken up by refrigeration, and air conditioning. Much of the rest is taken up by appliances: washers, dryers, that sort of thing. Finally there's heating and lighting and electronics. The major energy expenses are now transport, which we're trying to address, stuff, which is hard, and air travel, which will have to be scaled down because it's polluting the environment like crazy.

http://www.wattzon.org/gameplan.htm

Yet, electric utilities use lead-acid batteries, instead (providing ~30 seconds of backup power).

If utility scale flywheel systems are cheap, why aren't they being added to nuclear power plants (so those plants can be used more-effectively for peak power)?

http://beaconpower.com/

They aren't being added to nuclear powerplants because nuclear powerplants have a wide and controllable dynamic range (they can run higher or lower depending) and new ones aren't being created.

There are large scale installations of flywheel systems in government use, though. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab used a flywheel system for peak power delivery, as did many other government labs; including particle accelerators.

Can you name one?

Beacon Power

Has Beacon Power ever made a single sale in its 11-year existence? I see it is trading at $1.25 (up from 84 cents, within the last year). The NASDAQ keeps threatening to delist it.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22beacon+power%22+delisted

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5265/is_200102/ai_

[edit: in H1 2007 they produced sales of $842,034, with $30,244 gross profit, minus substantial operating expenses of $6,443,344. Such magnitudes may or maybe not be expected in a startup company]

On adding to powerplants, the intent with the beacon power demonstration plant is to actually commercially deploy the system and make revenues from regulation services. Technically this is not adding to an existing powerplant, though it is adding to the power grid. Eventually the aim to to add to existing power plants where possible, as this avoids transmission losses.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=123367&p=iro...

I'm not intimately familiar with the state of the two large utility scale demonstrations. The public information, posted in their stockholders 'results' release, is that they're building a 5 MW plant, have tested a 1 MW system, siting another (10 MW), and ramping up to production; following approval in open bid regulation market.

Beacon expects to have frequency regulation facilities in two locations before the end of 2008 with a total of five megawatts of capacity. To that end, the Company has initiated the process of establishing up to five megawatts of frequency regulation capacity on its Tyngsboro site, and is actively pursuing potential locations in the PJM Interconnection in addition to a site in Stephentown, New York. On July 17, 2008, the Company received a land-use permit it had requested from the town of Stephentown, New York, and subsequently exercised its option to purchase the land. Pending approval of an active interconnection request to NYISO and any other implementation requirements of the NYISO, a possible location for Beacon's first 20 megawatt frequency regulation plant will be in Stephentown.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=123367&p=iro...

There's also Pentadyne, which manufactures smaller scale UPS systems, used, for example, in process plants. The economics are much the same though, since it competes against batteries. If anything, economies of scale should tweak toward the utility scale implementation.

Actually, I don't think so. The accuracy of one's predictions must be weighed against the expected importance of their consequences on how one might decide to act. Obviously this is an issue important to both of us. But the energy problem is a big problem, perhaps the problem, with monstrous amounts of data, being generated faster than one can argue about it, at detail.

The goal is to act well, not to make zero mistakes. The arguments we've had have unearthed interesting data, but I would not suggest it's worthwhile to continue much further, unless, for either of us, it is in good sense productive. Some of the arguments and contrary positions you've taken have been very helpful for me. But I must admit, I am getting tired, and there is work to do.

Nuclear powerplants, typically, are capital intensive. For this reason, their operators aim for high capacity-factors. Unless economic forces are being ignored, they cannot easily be throttled. They run at 100%, all of the time, except when they are being refueled. The only nation that uses its nuclear powerplants in load-following mode is France -- since such a high proportion, some 80%, of its electricity is nuclear -- and France pays a price for that.

Additionally, it is not mechanically good for a nuclear-powerplant to throttle up and down. Such cycling causes parts to wear-out faster. If it is going to be used at all, it is best to keep it on, at a steady output.

There are other considerations. The nature of reactor poison build-up is such that throttling-up immediately after throttling-down tends, in typical reactor designs, to be difficult to do.

Unlike nuclear-powerplants, hydro and gas-turbine powerplants load-follow well (though the more-efficient gas-turbine powerplants take longer to start-up and might have to burn fuel, idling).

  .

The United States continuously adds nuclear capacity (through uprates, improved management, refurbishment of previously shut-down reactors, etc.). (http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/press/images/press191_02-06-1.gi...)(http://uspowerpartners.org/images/Section2Topic-NuclearEnerg...) Additionally, up to 33 reactor-units are expected to be on-order there, soon. (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html#preparing) Several reactor-vessels have already been ordered for new reactor-units to be built in the United States. Worldwide, 36 power-reactor-units are under construction, 97 are planned, and 221 are proposed.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html

Japan's nuclear share of its total electricity production (past and projected):

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html

  2008 30%
  2009 37%
  2017 41%
  2050 60%

South Korea's nuclear share of its total electricity production (past and projected):

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf81.html

  2006 39%
  2017 47%
  2035 60%

One thought: why aren't there flywheel systems at wind turbines, moderated by a CVT? This would get rid of a lot of transformation losses, and since a motor is unneeded it would be fairly cheap.

Should we assume that you've gotten that out of your system or ....

Let me be more careful.

There are two methods to throttle nuclear plants: by control rods, moderating neutron flux, and by temperature, moderating coolant flow (in, say, a pebble bed reactor). Either of these work well for generating heat, though coolant flow is simpler technically. Beyond this the plant is a steam turbine, which would have the same maintenance problems as any other steam turbine designed for the load. It's not as fast as gas, but the fuel is cheaper. But as DabAsteroid pointed out, Nuclear Plant are typically base loaded, in the US at least, so that's not terribly relevant.

I don't understand enough of the specifics of the particular designs Dab alludes to to comment on reactor poison buildup. I know that in pebble bed reactors throttling was intended by design.

I think that within the US market (which was, erroneously on my behalf, what I assumed the conversation was about), the point of new power plants not being yet created still holds: whatever load balancing one would need is an investment already made. (though this is mostly irrelevant to the point of discussion where nuclear plants don't supply peak demand). Of the proposals for which nuclear plants would supply peak power, the question is still out there: how will they balance the load? There are many possibilities, but they're mostly guesses. There is, increasingly, a diverse market for load balancing technology, and companies, struggling with technology and sales and tradition and economy, to try fill that need.

There are the various forms of CAES.

http://topics.energycentral.com/centers/gentech/view/detail....

There are also resistive shunts that can be used in conjunction with an entire national 100%-nuclear fleet running at full throttle full-time. The resistive shunts would be used to simply dump any excess power. We use resistive shunts for this, today (which is how we get rid of wind and solar power that grid utilities are required to "buy" from the public), but in the proposed scenario, they would be used even more. To encourage demand during times of excess supply, a real-time free-market could help.

I envision that demand fluctuations would be smaller in the future, because of larger overall demand dwarfing weather/seasonal/earthspin-related (paganistic) heating and cooling fluctuations, and because of a global move toward a continuous day (after all, many of us are up in the "middle of the night", here, making our "day" when we feel like it).

Nuclear powerplants can also make natural-gas, hydrogen, diesel, gasoline (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22nuclear+gasoline%22+graham...), octane, ethanol, methanol, deoxidized boron (http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html), etc., that can, in turn, be used as fuels for load-following and peaking power.

Has it ever been the goal of serious alt-energy boosters to replace all power with renewables?

Power on demand is another major problem: we need to supply a 'peak' of power when people demand it. Renewable energy wavers during its production, so we need to store some proportion of its energy somehow. The main thing to optimize for here is energy capacity versus cost, assuming you can get the power out fast enough. Efficiency also factors in, though not hugely. Anything over 50% is ok.

Portable power is most problematic. We need an energy source that's clean, but that has a high energy density, measured relative to both weight and volume. Solving each problem leads to different possibilities.

For example, if you solve the weight problem, but it takes up tons of room (hydrogen), you might be able to power airplanes. You can also power trains.

If you solve the volume problem, you can easily power automobiles and two wheeled vehicles. (for example, hydrocarbon fuel cells work pretty well here. We're trying to make compressed air vehicles that will work well here)

If you have solved the low cost and efficiency problems, and it doesn't weigh too much, you can power ships, in particular, container ships. If the fuel is buoyant you can make a double hulled vehicle and store the fuel in it. (compressed air works very well here).

Why would the fuel need to be buoyant? Ships use steel hulls, steel is denser than seawater, and, despite that, ships float. Some ships are even powered by lead-acid batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine#The_snorkel) -- though these batteries are recharged by onboard diesel generators -- and yet they float. Aircraft carriers and icebreakers are even powered by uranium -- 18 times the density of water.

Pressurizing the space between the two hulls of a double-hulled boat would require thicker steel than normal. (For a single curve, the tensile PSI needed is the air-pressure in PSI multiplied by the radius in inches -- for a sphere, divide by two.) Since steel is denser than seawater, this would tend to make the vessel sink (so the fuel would hardly buoyant unless it were further being contained in-between the hulls in carbon-fiber cells -- but that would obviate the need for two hulls). It would also impact the shape of the boat, since containing pressure is easier with a smaller radius-of-curvature (e.g. the usual flat-sides of containter ships would be counter-efficient for this task of retaining air-pressure).

An efficient design of such a container-ship might have two or three long, parallel tubes as hulls, with a container-platform mounted above on blade-pylons (to slice through the water). Optimally, the tubes would remain entirely submerged during cruising, so as not to interact with surface waves (which interaction normally causes efficiency losses).

One of the major costs in storing air at high pressures is the impact shell. This can be merged with a thick hull, which are already designed with this purpose in mind.

True, there are other alternatives. One can have a heavy fuel and a much larger hull. But if the fuel and tank and hull combo are buoyant you minimize the required material, lowering cost.

ESR said the opposite.

The industrial base load is the life blood of technological civilization; without it, we’d have a hideous global population crash, and then revert to pre-1750 conditions in which the economy is almost entirely subsistence farming and life is nasty, brutish, and short.

Hence, we could easily supply all of our power needs from renewables -- if we didn't mind getting medieval.

http://pages.nyu.edu/~mg1828/color/gimp.jpg

Atmosphere towers?! What's that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_tower_%28downdraft%29

The article refers to another similar concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

"A research prototype operated in Spain in the 1980s."

Basically shows that nuclear is the only viable alternative to coal and oil.

http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20050.htm

Based on physical models pointing at similar conclusions from a plethora of different directions, this will raise temperatures. By how much? We'd reach approximately 1650 ppm carbon. At only 1000 ppm, many models predict a raise of temperature from 3.5 to almost ten degrees C (varying across the world). Most importantly, the heat will mostly be circulated to polar regions, melting them. The last step of the argument is quite well known: at 4.5 degrees C, the land borne glaciers will begin to melt, drowning entire cities and countries. Before that happens, 20-50% species will be lost, and billions will face water shortages. The ensuing ecological niches and prevalence of human targets may end up creating many new diseases.

http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20046.htm

http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20054.htm

Why replace oil? Because it's tremendously risky not to, and not nearly so hard as people seem to believe.

That might objectively be the case, but it is not the case, according to ESR -- and it is his article that we are discussing. Did you read the article?:

[I] don’t believe [CO2 emissions are] driving global warming. ...

The pressing question, then, remains: What’s going to replace oil?

So, aside from greenhouse-gas considerations, why replace oil?

  .

For 150 years, oil supplies have continuously been pronounced to be on the verge of running out. And for 150 years, oil production has continuously increased.

http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/oil

http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/oil/5oilreservehistory.html

• 1879 -- US Geological Survey formed in part because of fear of oil shortages.

• 1882 -- Institute of Mining Engineers estimates 95 million barrels of oil remain. With 25 milliion barrels per year output, "Some day the cheque will come back indorsed no funds, and we are approaching that day very fast," Samuel Wrigley says. (Pratt, p. 124). ...

• 1906 -- Fears of an oil shortage are confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Representatives of the Detroit Board of Commerce attended hearings in Washington and told a Senate hearing that car manufacturers worried "not so much [about] cost as ... supply."

• 1919, Scientific American notes that the auto industry could no longer ignore the fact that only 20 years worth of U.S. oil was left. "The burden falls upon the engine. It must adapt itself to less volatile fuel, and it must be made to burn the fuel with less waste.... Automotive engineers must turn their thoughts away from questions of speed and weight... and comfort and endurance, to avert what ... will turn out to be a calamity, seriously disorganizing an indispensable system of transportation."

• 1920 -- David White, chief geologist of USGS, estimates total oil remaining in the US at 6.7 billion barrels. "In making this estimate, which included both proved reserves and resources still remaining to be discovered, White conceded that it might well be in error by as much as 25 percent." ...

• 1928 -- US analyst Ludwell Denny in his book "We Fight for Oil" noted the domestic oil shortage and says international diplomacy had failed to secure any reliable foreign sources of oil for the United States. Fear of oil shortages would become the most important factor in international relations, even so great as to force the U.S. into war with Great Britain to secure access to oil in the Persian Gulf region, Denny said.

• 1926 -- Federal Oil Conservation Board estimates 4.5 billion barrels remain. ...

• 1932 -- Federal Oil Conservation Board estimates 10 billion barrels of oil remain.

• 1944 -- Petroleum Administrator for War estimates 20 billion barrels of oil remain.

• 1950 -- American Petroleum Institute says world oil reserves are at 100 billion barrels. ...

• 2000 -- Remaining proven oil reserves put at 1016 billion barrels.

  .

http://www.google.com/search?q=2.1+quadrillion+barrels+oil

~2.1 quadrillion bbl / ~80 million bbl/day = ~72 thousand years of oil.

Regarding the wild swings in the estimates of remaining oil, the largest discrepancy comes from the fact that oil in different places requires different amount of toil to extract it. At a certain point, this is too much to pay for all but a few applications (where energy density is needed most, or where the stored hydrocarbons can be used for other purposes).

Already the oil infrastructure is some of the most complicated and costly equipment in the world. We don't know where that economic break even point will be, but we do realize that one must exist. This, among other things, is driving futures. Each new type of oil requires a new type of capital investment. The involved parties are making gambles on future technology. Further influencing this is the fact that it's polluting enough to, potentially, influence much of the world away from it, thereby reducing the attractiveness of such bets.

What wild swings? Over the last 150 years, they have gone in only one direction -- up.

it's polluting enough

Please be specific. Are you talking about smog? CO2?

to, potentially, influence much of the world away from it

Why would that happen now, instead of at any time during the last 150 years? Let's see what Google Images says:

http://images.google.com/images?q=world%20oil%20consumption%...

People and countries seem to like oil. They keep buying more and more of it. Why would they suddenly stop?

Are you talking about smog? CO2?

CO2 most importantly, but smog plays a major role.

Why would they stop? We've reached a few inflection points. Americans drive less this year than they did the last.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/business/19gas.html?ref=bu...

One might gather that price will similarly effect heating costs and flight usage. Fuel economy is one of the foremost items on the minds of Americans now, according to Gallup (#2 in national issues, apparently).

http://www.gallup.com/poll/108067/Fuel-Prices-Now-Clearly-Am...

Countries might increasingly wish to reduce their economic dependency on the oil market, as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do so. There has been much support for an ethanol economy in the US; for example the bipartisan bill to introduce biofuel installations in gas stations.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/08/bill-in-congres.html

Already Brazil has an ethanol economy, provoked by the 1973 oil crisis. Nations with similar agricultural capability and high oil dependency have the same incentives to guard against future market downturns.

Finally, there's the global warming problem. I assume you don't believe CO2 has a major role. But from a pure economic standpoint, it is likely the governments and the populace will increasingly believe it has a major role and will probably do something about it, either collectively or individually. This will probably influence demand to drop, though it may not do so suddenly. Anticipating this, oil companies have a riskier bet to make in large capital investments in heavy oil extraction. Increasingly, such companies will try to diversify into the broader energy business, as many are already making efforts to do.

Regarding oil-futures:

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Financial_Tsunami/Oil_...

The oil price today, unlike twenty years ago, is determined behind closed doors in the trading rooms of giant financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank or UBS. The key exchange in the game is the London ICE Futures Exchange (formerly the International Petroleum Exchange). ICE Futures is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Atlanta Georgia International Commodities Exchange. ICE in Atlanta was founded in part by Goldman Sachs which also happens to run the world’s most widely used commodity price index, the GSCI, which is over-weighted to oil prices.

As I noted in my earlier article, (‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’), ICE was focus of a recent congressional investigation. It was named both in the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' June 27, 2006, Staff Report and in the House Committee on Energy & Commerce's hearing in December 2007 which looked into unregulated trading in energy futures. Both studies concluded that energy prices' climb to $128 and perhaps beyond is driven by billions of dollars' worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE. Through a convenient regulation exception granted by the Bush Administration in January 2006, the ICE Futures trading of US energy futures is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, even though the ICE Futures US oil contracts are traded in ICE affiliates in the USA. And at Enron’s request, the CFTC exempted the Over-the-Counter oil futures trades in 2000.

So it is no surprise to see in a May 6 report from Reuters that Goldman Sachs announces oil could in fact be on the verge of another "super spike," possibly taking oil as high as $200 a barrel within the next six to 24 months.

  .

http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource

(I'm referring to how this was voted down.)

Science is not consensus.

We're running out of resources (not just oil. Copper, platinum, I belive... indium? are all going to be in short supply in a short few hundred years). The climate is changing. We don't care if it's man made or not, it's harming our living conditions. We're still polluting our lakes -- the great lakes have large segments of horribly toxic sediment, for example. (although cleanup is going well, and costing only a few billion dollars.)

And yes, I am a physics student taking some extra classes on analyzing human damage to the environment, and a number of my professors are researching or otherwise involved with this stuff, from attempting to create efficient solar cells to cleaning up the great lakes. I'm not an expert on our environmental challenges, but I think I have a somewhat better-than-average grasp of the situation.

You should google a man named Julian Simon.

There's only one side of this discussion who doesn't want to hear the truth -- that's the side that keeps down-modding everything that doesn't fit into their worldview.