Overpopulation: America Part 15: Fossil fuel energy--finite

Part 15: Overpopulation In 21st Century America Running Out Of Energy That Drives Civilization

Wednesday, April 14, 2010 9:45
By Frosty Wooldridge

Part 15: Fossil fuel energy--finite

Every day, you hear companies, governors and newscasters yelping about our emerging ‘green energy’ and ‘green technology’ and ‘alternative energy’.

Let’s look at our self-delusion more closely.

In order to drive cars, boats, planes and fuel industry, Americans burn 20 million barrels of oil daily while the rest of the world burns 62 million barrels. That equals 82 million barrels of oil every 24 hours!

When you multiply 365 days by 82,000,000 barrels of oil burned daily, it equals a whopping 29.9 billion barrels of oil annually.

If you remember your science, it took two billion years to produce all the oil on this planet. In other words, when oil reserves decline, we exhaust the single major energy source that drives our civilization and most other societies on this planet.

To show how much energy oil provides the U.S. annually, Michael Brownlee of www.transitionbouldercounty.org provided an astounding graph of one cubic mile of oil. That’s how much oil humans burn around the planet each year! That equals to the same amount of energy provided by 52 nuclear power plants built every year for 50 years or 104 operating coal-fired electrical plants built every year for 50 years or 32,000 wind turbines built every year for 50 years—and in continuous operation—or 91,250,000 solar panels built every year for 50 years.

In other words, oil produces dramatically incredible amounts of energy that we cannot and will not be able to duplicate in the coming years.

"The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources. Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above." James Woolsey, US Director of Central Intelligence 1993 - 1995

In his book, Too Many People, Lindsey Grant addresses our energy predicament. You may find his book at www.sevenlockspress.com and www.amazon.com. Grant is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Population Affairs.

“Fossil energy, along with agriculture, is the origin of most of our problems with climate change, soil, water and air pollution,â€