Peak Oil Nonsense

US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.

The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs.

Fully connected mesh networks are thermodynamically inefficient. Nature prefers the hub-and-spoke, i.e bifurcating tree like the internet and mass transport topology.

Ditto suburbia is economically inefficient. So with the coming debt defaults, I think we will see the end of suburbia and it will be more profitable to provide wireless service only big cities and mass transport. Outliers will pay much more. I think I had read that asian carriers, such as in Philippines are much more profitable, because the population density is so much higher, and they roll out high-end technologies only in the major cities, on a lag from the western world, as the technology gets cheaper.

@Andy Freeman:
Low population density has lower economies-of-scale for just about everything, efficiency of errands, roads, transportation, electric grid, parks & playgrounds, service businesses, etc.. All all the infrastructure has to be maintained, and much of the infrastructure in the USA very old and crumbling. Suburbia was subsidized by federal money for highways as an extension of FDR’s New Deal politics after WW2, which made USA highly dependent on oil for transportation. There was always a political incentive to create more highways, because those with land along the routes would see the value of their land instantly jump by 1000%. This was fueled with debt, which is now coming due. We will have a reversion to mean towards densification, with the coming debt contraction. Many of those houses built in this housing bubble, will be left to pasture.

P.S. I don’t believe in AGW nor “peak oil” frauds. All of the world’s oil production is nationalized, so I don’t trust the data on reserves nor the incentive for exploration.

Suburbia continuing forever would be perpetual motion.

@LS:
I disagree that USA can continue to subsidize the "country". Many didn't object to collectivist highways, FHA, Freddie Mac, etc.. while the dollar was the reserve currency making it possible to borrow from the rest of the world. But that is not sustainable, and we've reached the actuarial limit, especially given our population age pyramid contains a boomer bulge reaching the "scale down" and "move closer to conveniences" age. Including regulatory capture, I discussed via email with the statistician MW Hodges that the total govt share of the national income is likely north of 75% in the USA (if we had complete data) and provably north of 50% (with limited available data), or perhaps 90+% on an actuarial basis (but we don't have data to prove it).

My personal thought is suburbia appears to be a idealized lovefest with the agricultural age, sans the agricultural economy (local production of food) an that would sustain it. Idealized because profitable agriculture involves lots of mud, because it is not cost efficient to concrete all the pathways. Those who want to live in the country will either have to subsidize themselves, or do agriculture. Apparently the FDA and Monsanto are determined to monopolize agriculture.

I don't view this as a bad outcome, rather a necessary optimization of specialization. Cities are more dynamically interconnected and superficially social. And the country will still be there for those who want to pay for it or who want to escape that technology hum.

@Andy Freeman:
Could you make a specific economic case where suburbs are more efficient?

I was expecting this response:

Efficiency depends on what you want

If everybody could have what they want, then no one would be rich, and the world would be perfect without the concept of cost nor thermodynamics. Apologies for the forceful reply, but it is an absurd delusion that violates all science, to assert that efficiency is correlated with desire. Refute my link please.

Fuel is not the major cost of suburbia, which each person can verify as percentage of their family expenses. The major cost of suburbia is the lower economy-of-scale and costly duplication of everything, restaurants, fire departments, parks, electric/internet/cable/wireless grid, sewers, drainage, roads, infrastructure maintenance, etc.. Refer to the data I presented in my prior reply to Bob.

“Peak oil” does not translate to peak hydrocarbon motor fuel

Also, CNG or LPG can power any existing car with a $1000 conversion kit, Honda offers a CNG Civic, many fleets have already been converted, and Chesapeake is installing 1000 fueling stations now.

There will never be a shortage of hydrocarbon, because it is integral to the Carbon cycle of the earth. Carlin understood.

I think "peak oil" is another lie promulgated by the same interests that gave us the AGW lie, e.g. we find out yesterday that Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia. For those into conspiracy theories, King Hubbert who first promulgated the peak oil theory, created (listen to 16min) Technocracy, Inc. in 1933, whose purposes was to replace the free market system with one top-down controlled by technical experts. Sound familiar to AGW? Now we see EPA with aid of POTUS executive orders shutting down coal plants due to the bogus AGW "global warming threat", without any enabling law other than an arguably unconstitutional overreaching of executive branch powers.

@Winter: This might convince you of Germany's vulnerability.

I am trying to get a workable model for what appears to be major paradigm shift for the world.

I am listening to a roundtable discussion (some PhDs) about property rights and the local implementation of global Agenda 21, and it contains some data points that were new for me. I am skeptical of their perspective in the sense I don't want to be a victim of irrational fear-mongering (which is what they claim is being used). If anyone is interested in this, perhaps they could share their analysis of its relevance or irrelevance, if any, to current state-of-affairs with suburbia, debt crisis, and the economics thereof that may be forcing monopolization of industry in general. I haven't worked it all out in my mind yet in the sense of having irrefutable data and testing all sides of all hypothesis, so I hesitated to share it, but it is also somewhat more informative than any other roundtable on property rights I remember.

I suppose I would want to test the theory that this is a natural outcome of the decline of the industrial age, as vested interests who are incapable of transforming their antiquated industrial capital to the knowledge (software) age, are naturally resorting to politics to force the value of their capital, which results in zero-sum game theory that drags humanity down with the evaporation of their progressively useless capital. I welcome anyone who wants to point out that I am being overly dramatic, and instinctively I want to view this as a great honor to be a small part of the open source age, perhaps with software (and the freedom-of-information spread that is deriving from it) being the only or a significant way to lead humanity out of such a morass. Okay I let you all fire away and I won't be hurt by your candor.

We can replace all of the imported fuel we use for transportation without increasing our coal consumption at all over present levels. Best of all not only do we have lots of thorium that we've "thrown away" in the ash pile of existing coal plants coal itself contains enough thorium to self-fuel the reactors on a forward-going basis as well!

That is a path that has a five hundred year expected lifetime at expected population growth rates in the United States (about 1% a year) given our proved reserves and does not require increasing existing consumption of the given resource -- including the coal -- since we're replacing the electrical generation we now do with coal at the same time we use the coal for synfuel feedstock. As such it will not trash the existing market demand picture. It is a technology that we know will work with the remaining engineering challenges (and there are some!) all being known quantities. The big hurdles are political

DCarson, in all due respect, scientists can design safe nuclear plants, there are already sealed ones designed by Toshiba that get buried and use solid sodium salts and thus can't melt down. Also it is probably the case that we could use Thorium and have must less dangerous by products, but the military establishment doesn't want that, because they want the weapon's grade material.

In short, we don't have a free market in nuclear. TPTB are controlling the quality they want us to have.

As for uneconomic energy such as solar, even at $4 per watt system cost, it can't compete with coal and other forms of energy. Even if you pay as high as 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, you will be lucky to average 5 hours per day of full power out of your panels (net of all electrical losses of which there are numerous factors, go to windsun.com), so that is $4 per 5 x 365 / 1000 = 1.8 kilowatt hour per year. So that means you will recover the cost of your panels in $4 / $0.20 = 20 years, which exceeds their usable lifetime, not to mention batteries which die in 5 years.

And if you had invested that same money for 20 years, it would be several times in value.

Investing in solar panels is bankruptcy, and this will be evident once the debt subsidy of the central banks is removed and the western profligacy evaporates.