While thinking about the Midwest floods, give some attention to this from Stratfor.com:
The world has been obsessed with oil prices. That's as it should be, but it is clearly time to make room for an additional obsession. Corn prices closed above $7 a bushel Wednesday for the first time. The reason was that unusually wet weather damaged the American crop, and U.S. corn production was forecast to fall about 10 percent. Declines were expected, but not of this magnitude. Corn has risen 75 percent in the past year, while rice, wheat and soybeans also reached records.There have been many theories about the reasons for oil price rises, ranging from the price of the dollar to conspiracies among speculators. The problem with these theories is that while they might explain oil, they do not explain commodity prices. The price of corn has risen not because there are speculators -- although there surely are -- but because of crop damage (among other factors).
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Well, I don't know about any 'topia' options. I do know that, no matter who's taking the tally, sooner or later (with not one suggesting it will last out the century), we're going to run out of petroleum.
So we're going to HAVE to find something else, or highly change the way we live on a global scale. I mean beyond Amish because, you know what? Last I checked, the Amish have no mines, no factories, and yet they still have windows in their houses, and use metal tools. They are somewhat dependent on the technology used elsewhere too.
Coal? It isn't renewable either. (Not talking about environmentalism here. I'm talking about.. we can't make no mo'. When its gone, its gone.) That could boost us another couple of hundred years, perhaps. Still not any sort of long term answer on a societal or species scale, but hell, we're humans. Heaven forbid we use our brains to concern ourselves with needs beyond the next generation or so. That's gonna be their problem.
Nuclear power? If we can find an honest, currently useable (if we want to currently use it, after all) to dispose of the waste that is both physically safe, and safe in a national security sense. There is vitrification (because I know someone is gonna bring it up). It does make the waste more stable. It doesn't make it any less radioactive. So, while less likely to eat through the thing it is stored in, it doesn't change that you gotta store it in something, and you got to put the thing you store it in.. somewhere.
And you don't have to be a tree-hugger to get really 'NIMBY' about radioactive waste storage. Anyone here personally willing to have people store radioactive waste within 200 feet of their property, or anywhere they, or their children, will walk? And, again, the waste also doesn't go away. It doesn't decay, and it will take a LOOONG time for it to become safe. So, if using it on a national level, there's also a simple case of running out of storage space for the waste, even if it was harmless. We're running out of landfill space as it is, and that stuff isn't radioactive. (Despite the smell.)
Hydroelectric is nice, though very location specific.
Personally, I think the answer might be.. all of the above and more. Despite the call to find a catch-all substance to replace oil, even OIL was never a catch-all, and we've always used a multitude of substances to run things, long before environmentalism. Coal, hydro, thermal, solar, natural gas, nuclear.
The big question seems to be not how to heat the homes (that's where you get the variety pack). Its what do we run our cars on. And most of those suggestions.. well, you can't exactly put them in your tank and go driving.
Nuclear Waste...Besides vitrification, there's also reprocessing (at least for plutonium). Or we could stick the spent fuel in a specially-designed reactor to burn off the "hottest" and longest-lived portion of nuclear waste (i.e., the actinides), and then vitrify the remainder.
Karen: "The big question seems to be not how to heat the homes (that's where you get the variety pack). Its what do we run our cars on. And most of those suggestions.. well, you can't exactly put them in your tank and go driving."
Maybe you don't quite see the seriousness of the situation. I think the issue is how to heat homes (and run factories, etc.). Cars are a relatively minor issue, because people can live without cars quite easily. Furthermore, once you accept that oil is running out, and crop ethanol is a non-starter, that only leaves hydrogen obtained from water by electrolysis, which brings you back to the need for electricity, and thus to the same issue as heating homes and running factories.
To repeat, I see these scenarios:
(i) Green dream: everyone cycles, consumes very little, grows their own food, and is happy meditating when not mending their rooftop wind generators
(ii) Shabby state socialism: Somewhat like Cuba today or the UK in the 1940s, everything is rationed, belts are tightened, and power is expensive, provided mainly by coal and nuclear
(iii) Dark age: Reversion to a nonindustrial age, perhaps literally stone age or perhaps more like mediaeval, by quick collapse, slow decline, or massive wars
Cars account for 65 percent of fuel usage. Not transportation, just cars.
Convincing a group that barely manages to resist buying personal Hummers for personal use that they can go without cars would be a neat trick.
If we COULD do that, our remaining fuel could last a whole lot longer.
But highly unlikely.
Nuclear waste - for now, find a federally owned spot in the middle of a desert Out West and park it.
In a hundred years or less, that 'waste' will be the feedstock for some industrial process that uses the radioactive elements.
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