I'm no scientist - but you guys are way off. Desalinization is expensive. That's why the Saudi's are giving up on it for farming and buying land in Africa instead. As for energy options. Understand the law of thermodynamics and your silly dreams of a perpetual motion machine will go away. Understand what EROEI is as well.... and what the commercial viability of an energy source is. And yes, Peak Oil is real. Wells dry up. It's not a stretch of logic to assume that if one well dries up - then all oil wells eventually dry up. There will always be oil, but if you need to expend more energy to get that oil than the energy you get from the oil you extract - it makes no sense. Man will stop using oil before it ever runs out. Fossil fuel use is how the planet went from several hundred million to almost 7 billion in a couple centuries. When fossil fuels go away, so to will much of that population. And please don't confuse Peak Oil with the idea that we will run out of oil tomorrow. Dating peak oil is a different issue than saying that yes, eventually, we will run out of commercially available oil - which to me is a fact.
Do the math... if you use coal to desalinate, than you no longer have 200 years worth. Here are some numbers to consider: If you have a resource that is enough to last 100 years at current levels.... If your usage grows just 2% a year, you no longer have 100 years - you have 55 years left. And you know what? I would say that 20 years in, that commodity will get VERY expensive. If usage grows 5% per year, then you no longer have 100 yrs worth - you have only 36 years left. Right now China has a population of 1.25 billion people. 300+ million live in urban areas. They want to add another 295 million by 2025 into the urban areas. Imagine what that does to your 200 years of coal left number. The law of exponential growth is highly underestimated.
Well, I would think you could use solar power to take the salt out of the water instead of using coal. Next, China and Russia could declare war on each other to help decrease the population. There, I just solved the world's problems. Not that hard.
I'm no expert in Solar desalinisation - but from a few things I have read on the topic, it's not scalable or commercially that viable. I could be wrong - I'd be happy to see a link to an article showing me otherwise. My experience with a lot of these technologies is that most people read sci-fi type mags of crazy futuristic predictions and think it will happen overnight. Wall Street speculators love those kinds of stories. The reality is very different. You know why? Just look at your neighborhood - how many people drive cars on natural gas, or have solar panels or wind turbines on their roofs. Ask yourself why not? There's a reason we use fossil fuels. And yes, Exxon does buy patents that enable higher fuel efficiency - but at the end of the day, we use fossil fuel because it's so cheap. For now. Yes we will transition eventually, but there will be societal costs. We will transition to alternative energy sources that will either have a low net energy return, or will not be as dense an energy source as fossil fuels. Societies and civilizations grow the best when their energy inputs are a lot less than their outputs. That's how societies attain surplus, and thus, complexity.
Just by putting our massively unemployed/underemployed engineering workforce to work -- we could cut fossil fuel consumption down by 1/3rd with just off-the-shelf technology, and probably down by 50% with new technology. Absolutely enormous numbers of processes out there are innefficiently implemented, or completely wasteful. You know how many millions of barrels per day in the USA are wastefully burned when people drive to jobs that don't accomplish anything useful? How many aircraft needlessly fly coast-to-coast half empty day in and day out because fossil fuels are so cheap that there's little incentive to rationalize the airline industry?
Sounds like this requires central planning. This is America. No go. People do not want to be orchestrated, no matter how "valid" the cause. They yearn to be free.
And out-of-control national debt, or the military, the forces by which cheap oil has been procured in massive quantities from foreigners, isn't an example of "central planning" run amuck? Americans are f*cking stupid if they think they can have it both ways; central planning in some aspects of their lives, and 'freedom' in other aspects of their lives. Its an all or none proposition in the long run.
(beginning of my hypothetical case) I am glad you agree with central planning. As part of your agreement with central planning - you are now my employee. I have decided that you make $7.25/hr. and that you are moving to New York City to collect trash along the streets. I for my "planning" part will "rent" you out to one of the trash services the city employs and charge for you at the market rate. How you will live in NYC at $7.25/hr - not my concern....(end hypothetical case) Central planning only works for those doing the "planning." The "planned for" are screwed! I'll take free markets over bullshit communism/socialism/fascism any day of the week. -gastropod
Its already like that. If you're aligned with the government, you get to have all the oil and cash you want. If you're not, then your ability to access resources is practically zero. Try being a non-government (ie: non-financial industry) employee in NYC. Chances are, you aren't making a living wage, and you're left to compete against those who are being given millions of $$$ per year by the central planners. We're already very far down that path already, and the banking elites have benefitted enormously from communism and central planning, while they exhalt the 'rest of us', to embrace capitalism. Note that this was pre-Obama, Pre-Bush, and even pre-Clinton or Pre Bush Sr. The "planned for" have done extremely well thus far, ie: the people on Wall Street, even the American people more broadly, who have enjoyed an artificially high standard of living because of central planning. But just like as in the Soviet Union, eventually central planning falls apart as the underlying real economy -- that of industrial production -- collapses, as it did in the Soviet Union, and as it is in the USA.