How About Making Capitalism More Clean?

iStation said:

We're facing the end of cheap and abundant oil.
I think we should use oil only as material for synthesis of chemical products not as fuel to burn.

True. Sensible suggestion.

iStation said:

Most of internal combustion engines will be replaced with electric motors within a decade.
Ultra-low-cost solar cells, i.e. personal power plants, enable us to use plug-in hybrid or EV.
Ultra-low-cost solar cells also will be connected as a energy network and pump up water or make hydrogen to store the excess electricity.

Not a hope in hell of that actually happening. For one, we actually can't produce enough solar power even if we wanted to.

Also while I don't mind running my car on petrol, where if a spark goes in my tank there's not enough air to blow me to hell, or diesel which isn't volatile enough to mix with the air explosively, hydrogen detonates in a way that is exceedingly dangerous, and I'd rather not have any in my car, no matter how many environmentalists jump on that bandwagon. And regardless, it ignores the point that hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy generating medium.

Maddus Mattus said:

Yeah, but no reason to be so spastic about it now. In the 1980's we thought we ran out of oil. In 2008 there has never been so much known oil deposites.

A hell of a lot more demand for it now too. Maybe that's where the problem lies - where demand is high and supply is limited, price goes up.

We'll never "run out" of oil - the price will just become punishingly high after a while, and people will have to learn to live with it.

Maddus Mattus said:

Sure we need alternative forms of energy. But there is still plenty of oil to go around. I always opt for a good mix, the old and the new. People think we can just flip a switch and be done with the evil oil! Doesnt work that way.

Absolutely! There's no way that we could drop dependence on oil without totalling the economy, but we can still reduce dependence on it. Even if you don't agree with the environmental reasons for reducing dependence on oil, you must surely agree that for security and economic reasons we do have to reduce our dependence on it.

Maddus Mattus said:

The video about the professor explaining that we need fuel's because their energy density is high and they are easy to transport, is very good watch. He says as long as there is no alternative liquid fuel, we will still be dependent on oil.

Why does it have to be liquid? Surely it just needs to be storable. In any case, you can turn coal into oil, use ethanol or a stabilised hydrogen mixture, all of which are liquid and can be generated from electricity (albeit at an energy and capital cost), so in principle you could generate liquid fuel from solar power or wind turbines. It's just that in practise that's not going to happen when oil is so much cheaper.

Now if economics took the environmental damage into account in their cost estimates, say with some kind of levy on carbon emissions it would all work out economically, and capitalism would just select the best damage-adjusted energy source out there...

[quote user="Maddus Mattus"
 I liked his idea to transform solar energy into a fuel, but I sure hope he can find een alternative to water. We kinda need that to live. And it is not as abundant as we think
[/quote]

I hope to God that you're joking ... there's more water on this planet than oil by quite a margin - don't ever let the price differential between bottled oil and bottled water tell you different.

I assume you mean Deuterium (D₂ atomic weight 4 also called heavy hydrogen) which is a constituent of heavy water (D₂O, atomic weight 12) which is used as part of the uranium enrichment process.

I fail to see how this has any relevance to the discussion however, since the Hydrogen that runs in cars is simply normal hydrogen (not deuterium) and there is no worldwide shortage of deuterium, given that it can be cheaply extracted from seawater.

In any case, it makes up 0.015% of ordinary hydrogen naturally, so in the 1,260,000,000 trillion litres of water on Earth there's roughly 126795063 trillion kg of hydrogen, of which about 3803851 trillion kg is D₂

This leads me rather relentlessly to the conclusion that all of the problems with D2 are about extraction from water rather than about getting the water in the first place.

So no, there is absolutely no reason to suggest that if we stop burning oil we'll run out of water, or that if we stopped burning oil we'd see the world fall into chaos and wars with people fighting to obtain each other's water.