On the downslope of peak oil, cold fusion remains hope for the future

Why is LENR research so important?

Because the world energy outlook portends decreased oil supplies in the near future. In fact, the International Energy Agency has finally publicly accepted the Peak scenario for conventional oil, and now claims it already happened in 2006.

What this means is that the easy oil has been found, and what remains in the ground is more difficult to retrieve, more dangerous to extract, and more expensive to process.

Think of deepwater oil and the BP catastrophe. Think of tar sands and oil shale and the tremendous ecological devastation wrought in its extraction, including the enormous amount of water needed to process this unconventional oil.

Here’s a graph from the annual World Energy Outlook 2010 published recently by the International Energy Agency.
Chris Martenson, of Energybulletin.net has written a summary of the implications of this report that is sobering and well worth reading.

Alternative energies are standing by, ready to replace what we get from oil, you say? Not so fast. There is no amount of renewable energy that will replace the energy density of petroleum, gas, and coal.

This article by Roger Adair How sustainable is renewable energy?, published on www.energybulletin.net tells a personal story of his experience in the wind energy business in Ireland, Scotland, and England.

The amount of deuterium in one gallon of water is equivalent to the energy of 300 gallons of gasoline. (read Department of Energy What is fusion? which describes the hot fusion process.) This is the kind of energy density that will power global mass transportation systems, allow manufacturing of high-technology materials and goods, and send humans to space, and beyond.

This is the kind of clean, atomic power that the new energy movement reveals can lead Earth in an evolution of human society, and as McLuhan said, “program our environment” with care, and in service to all living things.

As access to oil becomes increasingly difficult, the entire infrastructure that petroleum built will fall away, for each technology creates an entire landscape of services and disservices. The world that petro-dollars created will dissolve in direct proportion as the fuel disappears, and this means more than no filling stations for your car.

Your job, your home, your school, your food, your fun, your clothes, your Facebook page – our lives are cradled in a world that is slipping away. We cannot continue to live the way we do, and we don’t want to. But if cold fusion scientists cannot get this technology developed, it’s hard times for planet Earth for years, and possibly decades, to come.

Every effort must be made to get the basic science of low-energy nuclear reactions understood and online. Only then can private investment come in to design and engineer new forms of energy devices with the power to fuel a new type human civilization, where ecological wisdom is fundamental to all processes.

What can you do?

Jan Marwan told us:

Start talking wherever you are, in your family, at work, when you’re in governmental institutions, start talking. The more you talk about this topic, the more you raise it, the more you involve other people, …you know… it spread’s like a virus!

Cold Fusion Now!

Colin Campbell: “After oil, we’ll be happier.”

Colin Campbell, geologist, author, and founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas ASPO [visit] spoke with Jim Puplava on the Financial Sense Newshour Saturday, November 6 saying “The bulk of our oil came from just two epochs in our Earth’s long history, just 90 million and 150 million years ago, and we are now entering the second half of the oil age.”

In short, for the past 100 years, humankind has built a civilization using the energy derived from oil created from “very rare circumstances in geological time”.

World discoveries of oil fields peaked in the 1960s, and in 1981, the world began to use more oil than it found in new fields. Since then, we’ve been drawing from the same mega-fields discovered decades earlier.

A leading figure in the peak oil movement, Mr. Campbell admits that “there’s no good information about oil reserves in the public” but described what prompted the doubling of reported oil reserves in the 1980s.

Since prices were based on a quota system – which was based on reserves, when prices plunged in the mid-80s, countries like Saudi Arabia, whose land held the largest oil fields in the world, increased their reserves overnight, thereby increasing their quota, and elevating the price. Other members of OPEC followed suit, increasing reserves many times over with no new discoveries, only an accounting trick.

He believes, along with Ken Duffeyes [visit], that the peak of regular conventional oil was in 2005, and he puts the peak of all categories of oil, including deep water oil, tar sands, and these “more difficult things that are slower to extract”, in 2008.

“It [the date for peak] might have been influenced by the fall in demand due the economic recession, but that’s seems to be about the date as far as I can piece it together.”

Although there is great debate about the date of peak oil, focusing on a date misses the point. According to Mr. Campbell, the actual date of peak oil is “not as important as the vision of the long slope on the other side of peak, that’s really what’s going to change the world when we enter the second half of the age of oil, when production declines, and the economy contracts. It’s really very obvious.”

The decline is slow at only 2-3% per year, but it is declining. “The banks have been lending more than they have on deposit confident that tomorrow’s growth will be the collateral for today’s debt. Well that’s no longer valid, and so the thing begins to unravel”.

Robert Hirsch, who in 2005 did a study for the federal government on peak oil,
suggested that the best case scenario to mitigate the effects of peak oil was to start planning 20 years before the peak date, and the second best scenario would be to start planning 10 years before peak date.

Mr. Campbell agreed with Mr. Puplava that we probably don’t have twenty years, or even ten years to prepare. He thinks we face a radical change in the way our economy runs, and though he didn’t mention a cold fusion scenario, he’s optimistic that a more sustainable and local economy could be an opportunity for humanity, and that we could be happier than we are now.

“There could be better relationships and better understandings that flow from this… I don’t know if you’ve been to an airport in recent years, but it’s just a kind of nightmare experience.”

Listen to Colin J. Campbell on Jim Puplava’s Financial Sense Newshour archives for November 6 or click the link below for the 30 minute audio.

2010-1106-2 Colin Campbell by Cold Fusion Now

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