[ExI] Ignorant fear mongering (was Re: Doomsday Oil Price: (was RIP: Peak Oil))

[Brent Allsop]

Hi faithless fear mongers,

It'd be really interesting to find out how many experts agree with this 
kind of fear mongering, and if there are any better arguments for this 
that any experts think are more valid.

These arguments still just seem silly, to me.  Many people once claimed 
we had reached peak oil, at last in the US.  But even that is no longer 
true right?  Many people are now arguing we may be on track to start 
approaching complete oil independence.  I missed the original "RIP: Peak 
Oil'  article - was it about this? If so, to bad it, or the response 
wasn't canonized, so it wouldn't be lost and repeated endlessly.  
Obviously, I'm not an expert on this particular issue, but it seems to 
me that electricity for use in cars and everything is exploding.  And 
nuclear energy, despite Fukushima, is continuing towards a big and safe 
Renascence.  (Their about to build a big new one here in Utah, already)

You mentioned that it would have been great to get started back in the 
70s!!??  Do you know how many people launched in this dirrection back 
then with billions of $$, only to lose their shirts, and everything, 
because they were so successful at crashing the price of even oil for 
such a long time?  You, We, and Obama, seem to be failing to learn from 
all that, and grossly repeating these mistakes, putting large money into 
already completely failing institutions, just like last time.

It takes energy to get energy, pfffff...  Yea, maybe for fossil fuels 
and other similar primitive and dirty stuff.  The FV output per cost 
continues to rise exponentially, no additional energy required, right?  
I'd bet the bang per energy research cost or work (as measured in non 
automated human hours) is exponentially growing also, even for fossil 
and other similar fuels.

Am I the only one that thinks it'd be valuable to survey to see just how 
many experts there are in both sides of this issue, and what the experts 
agree are the best reasons, and the morality of current society or the 
general population, as compared to the experts, including trending, on 
this?  If you guys think this is such an important moral issue, 
shouldn't you start some kind of petition, or something, somewhere, or 
at least do something?  Or are you just a lot of mistaken, noisy, non 
expert, hot air, just wasting everyone's time and slowing things down 
with such posts?

Who and how many, here, are on either side of this issue?  Or does 
nobody but me care what everyone else thinks, and why, and am I the only 
one that tires of all these continuously repeated popular noisy mistakes 
on either side?

For decades, before a few years ago, the same kinds of silly mistaken 
noisy arguments were repeated in these groups, add infinitem, even more 
than peak oil, about consciousness and qualia.  Has anyone noticed that 
nobody waists their time on any of that any more here?  The same for the 
importance of Friendly AI, even though there is much less expert 
consensus emerging on that issue (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/16 
) There is a clear expert consensus emerging on some critically 
important moral issues on consciousness that were once lost in the 
popular ignorant noise (i.e. the popular wisdom is being significantly 
amplified, or at least finally catching up with the expert's at a faster 
rate).  It appears the emerging expert consensus is we're on the verge 
of the greatest scientific discovery of all time in that field:   The 
effing discovery of the relationship or mapping between subjective 
experience or quale and the underlying neural correlates.  It's so fun 
to be able to say things like that, without fear of starting yet another 
many month infinitely repetitive, conversation war, with the noisy 
clueless masses, as it once would surely have done, before we even got 
to that level.  (If you don't know why this is, see the clear emerging 
state of the moral art expert consensus camp: 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6 ).

Brent Allsop


On 2/25/2012 4:40 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 12:01:22PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote:
>
>> I see the point, and wonder whether in fact we are not already in such a
>> trap.
>>
>> OTOH, rather than going for a replacement with lower-EROI alternatives
>> which is becoming increasingly unlikely for the reasons explained therein,
>> perhaps we should make use of whatever resources we can still put on the
>> table for breakthrough-oriented research programmes.
> We pretty much know where to sink the bulk of the money and resources
> we still have (which are going, going, gone) -- it's increasing electrification wherever
> possible, energy conservation in nonessential areas, synfuels, thin-film
> PV and so on -- I could give a long list but nobody will read it, so I won't.
>
> There's sure some low hanging fruit in R&D still but we no longer can
> afford throwing around rapidly evaporating funds for high-risk high-payoff stuff.
> That's because we've waited to long, the right time would have been
> early 1970s (some early projects were started then but were cut in
> early 1980s because people are poor in foresight).
>
> Now we're out of time and money, need to focus on boring, sure winner areas.
> Deploying rather than developing. Germany does some of that, but also
> too little, too late.
>
> I'm sure many people will fail to see the lesson nevermind to learn from it,
> and will fail to assign blame where blame belongs.
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>