Website review: The Oil Drum | &Energy Resources an...
laodan discovered this in Energy Industry
•1 reviews since Jun 30, 2007
energy-industry, complexity
•theoildrum.com/node/2724
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laodan discovered 11 months ago- "Energy Resources and Our Future" in The Oil Drum - a 1957 Speech by Hyman Rickover
We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the world's energy; water power accounts for only 1%; and the labor of men and domestic animals the remaining 6%. This is a startling reversal of corresponding figures for 1850 - only a century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5% of the world's energy, and men and animals 94%. Five sixths of all the coal, oil, and gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel Age has been burned up in the last 55 years. Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of living will of a certainty continue through the next century and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will soon definitely begin to rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted, and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel certain that when economically recoverable fossil fuels are gone science will have learned how to maintain a high standard of living on renewable energy sources? I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants - those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. Energy Resources and Our Future Written in 1957. Amazing is it not? Societal change is always slow and always has prophets who are not heard by the decision makers and the citizens. 1. Societies are like very large ensembles containing smaller ensembles that in turn contain other smaller ensembles at the image of Russian dolls. The difference between Russian dolls and societies is in the quantities of sub-ensembles each of them contains. Russian dolls contain 6, 10 or some more while societies contain an unknown number, not infinite in absolute terms, but surely infinite in term of human comprehension. 2. Each ensemble and sub-ensemble constituting the whole is composed of a series of factors that inter-relate upon one another. 3. Societal change emerges out of the complexity made up by all the interrelations between the multitude of factors at work in human societies. Force is to observe that we do not till this very day master the knowledge to understand such complexity and perhaps never will...
- "Energy Resources and Our Future" in The Oil Drum - a 1957 Speech by Hyman Rickover
