Thanks!
In reply to this comment by Throbbin:
In addition to this, the companies exploiting the tar sands get a $5 billion a year tax break, even though they are profiting in the billions.

*quality

In addition to this, the companies exploiting the tar sands get a $5 billion a year tax break, even though they are profiting in the billions.

*quality

Ahw this video makes ecotards cry.

It's quite simple and I believe it was stated by a Saudi sheik "The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones, The Oil Age won't end because we run out of oil"

This means that long before oil runs out we will have a better way to power the world. And it will take long for all the oil to run out, much longer than the ecos predict. There a vast amounts of oil in tar sands and shales. Huge new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of South American countries. Beyond oil there are still higher reserves of natural gas and coal.

If we don't want to have to resort to geo-engineering to restore a warming climate we must find an alternative to fossil fuels long before they run out. So what do we have, wind, water and sun. Only the sun could reasonably provide all the energy we need after a huge industrial effort to build these things in place like the Sahara.
However we also have nuclear energy. There are vast amounts of Uranium that are waiting to be discovered once the demand for Uranium increases. Using a Thorium reactor you could breed and burn fissile material out of Thorium. This process yields much less long lived waste because you basically burn up most of the radioactive materials. Also Thorium is three times as plentiful as Uranium.
This gives Fusion a lot of time to get its act together and finally deliver on the promise of nearly boundless energy.

Creating fertilizer doesn't need fossil fuels. All it needs is nitrogen, hydrogen and high pressures and temperatures (energy).
Al machines can still run on clean fuel cells which were charged with power delivered by the above processes of energy generation.

I'm quite optimistic, I think we are heading for a bright future if we invest in alternative energy and don't fuck up the World too much in the time it takes to get to that goal.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'oil, canada, resources, impact' to 'oil, canada, resources, impact, NAFTA, tar sands, Alberta' - edited by notarobot

This "documentary" also sucks. There is lots of information available about the Tar Sands in Alberta, but the video doesn't present any of it. They just video tape themselves visiting a few sites and speculating about peak oil. Documentary's are supposed to present facts. Ideally facts that are important but not well known, this video doesn't present anything more than the existence of the Tar Sands in Alberta, and just how much oil they have in them(and no actual numbers, they just they have "a lot"). That's all common knowledge, high school students would be expected to come up with more for a school report.

>> ^Skeeve:
She's hot, but she's also full of crap. There is an estimated 1.75 trillion barrels of conventional oil worldwide (mostly in Saudi Arabia). If we continue to use about 30 billion barrels of oil per year we would run out in 58 years. The Athabasca Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada has at least 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, doubling that rough estimate to 116 years. There is a further 235 billion barrels in the tar sands of Venezuela.
She says tar sands (among other energy sources) wont make up for a fraction of the oil we use but she should have checked the numbers - tar sands make up about 2/3 of the world's oil.
I totally agree that we should reduce our dependence on oil and work towards more efficient and more environmentally friendly sources of energy, but using the same inaccurate scare tactics that people have been using for decades is not the right way to do it.


The main reason the "scare tactics" aren't effective is because there's always a fleet of people who want to come out and say "That's not true! Everything's fine, we've got decades to worry about it! Why do anything until it's all gone?" People choose to believe the rosier picture. I guess that's human nature.

The reason she says tar sands won't make up the difference is because it's a lot harder to extract.

Case in point, from the Wikipedia page on the Athabasca Oil Sands of Alberta, it says that only 10% is able to be economically retrieved. That estimate is out of date, since that's based on an oil price of $69/barrel, and it's ~$125 right now. So, more oil will be extractable, but only because of the higher price.

You're also assuming fixed demand, but in reality demand is going up, and is expected to rise exponentially as nations like China and India start buying cars en masse.

The only reason we won't actually run out of oil is because we use a free market to distribute it. Given a diminishing supply, and rising demand, price will grow rapidly. People will have to curtail their use of oil, simply because they won't be able to afford to use it anymore.

If there's no comparably cheap alternative, there's going to be a global economic crash the likes of which we've never experienced. Cheap alternatives, if they can be found, will take years to develop, and decades to implement.

We knew all this in the 1970's, but decided not to invest in developing an alternative. Mostly because a bunch of people, backed by the oil industry, came out and made an argument essentially saying "eh, we've got a long time to worry about it, don't develop alternatives!"

Telling people the truth (a "scare tactic" of the worst kind) hasn't worked. She figured maybe men will listen if she does a sexy dance while speaking the truth.

Guess she'll have to try something else.

The problem Skeeve is that these tar sands aren't as easy to extract the oil from. The amount of total gained energy from extracting the oil is less and the whole process is more costly. Though to me this seems to suggest the price of oil will continue to steadily increase. I don't really agree with the thought that the supply of oil will drop rapidly, or that the price will sky rocket. I do think the price will go up fast enough to cause us to have to change our ways of life, but not as bad as depicted in this video.

She's hot, but she's also full of crap. There is an estimated 1.75 trillion barrels of conventional oil worldwide (mostly in Saudi Arabia). If we continue to use about 30 billion barrels of oil per year we would run out in 58 years. The Athabasca Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada has at least 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, doubling that rough estimate to 116 years. There is a further 235 billion barrels in the tar sands of Venezuela.

She says tar sands (among other energy sources) wont make up for a fraction of the oil we use but she should have checked the numbers - tar sands make up about 2/3 of the world's oil.

I totally agree that we should reduce our dependence on oil and work towards more efficient and more environmentally friendly sources of energy, but using the same inaccurate scare tactics that people have been using for decades is not the right way to do it.