Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Thursday, May 13, 2004  

Whither the Oil World

I have been following these oil future projections for a few years now since Scientific American explained to me the pistachio nut metaphor.

Crudely put (to make a pun) we run out of oil not when the last well is pumped dry, but after the halfway point. Here's how it works: You're in a room chock full of pistachio nuts. To eat them, you pick up a handful, easily done, and shell , discarding the shells. Every time you reach for nuts, you efforts are well rewarded, until about the halfway point when you pick up 50% shells, and 50% unshelled nuts. As you keep going, you find it taking more and more energy to find unshelled nuts. Eventually the effort isn't worth the reward.

As much as you love pistachios, easier alternate food supplies become more enticing.

If you want to know the real future of energy you must go here to the Focus Fusion Society.

If I had a million bucks to spare, it's where I would put it. Clean fusion energy, direct current (not heat) produced, and ridiculously simple in principle.

posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:20 PM |

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