Quote Originally Posted by Firn View Post
I think a key matter will be how a brief global shortage of a central element of our modern society, like petroleum will influence the global economy. Today it's slice of the costs in manufacturing most goods and transporting them over the sea is pretty small. A sustained high price should have a ripple effect, allowing for the extraction of so far too costly sources of fossil fuels, make alternative energetic sources more attractive and shift demand away from uses such as heating. The big question is just how smoothly and quickly such adaptions can happen and how far the finite ressourcs can be streched.
Firn,

Energy disruption resulting from today's geopolitical situation will of course have varying political and economic consequences depending upon one's location, however I do not see it as resulting in the extinguishment of our species. Anything less than the absolute worst case can be dealt with....find a way, make a way!

Leider habe ich diese bucher nur auf englisch, aber, IMHO they are worth the read:

  • For context on our global petroleum economy:


Daniel Yergin's The Prize and The Quest

  • For an excellent in depth technical counterpoint to petroleum dependency:


Dr. George A. Olah (Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry), Dr. Alain Goeppert, and Dr. G.K. Surya Prakash, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy

  • For a 'how-to' hobby (if only there was enough time ):



And for a quick read...

Gas Bears Up Bets on Catastrophic Surplus, By Asjylyn Loder, January 16, 2012 11:03 AM EST, Bloomberg News

Hedge funds turned bearish on U.S. natural gas for the first time in eight weeks as a surplus and warmer-than-normal weather pushed the price of the heating fuel to the lowest level in more than two years.

The funds and other large speculators switched from bets that futures will rise to a bearish, or short, position of a net 10,344 futures equivalents in the week ended Jan. 10, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commissions Commitments of Traders report on Jan. 13.

Natural gas plunged 13 percent last week on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the biggest decline since August 2009, after forecasts showed above-average temperatures through January. Stockpiles in the week ended Jan. 6 stood at 3.377 trillion cubic feet, 17 percent above the five-year average, the U.S. Energy Department reported on Jan. 12.
Storage slipped 95 billion cubic feet in the week ended Jan. 6, compared with a five-year average decline of 128 billion, the Energy Department reported. Inventories rose to an all-time high of 3.852 trillion cubic feet on Nov. 18.

Supplies may reach a seasonal record of 2.4 trillion cubic feet in March, which is when heating demand usually ends and producers begin piping more gas into storage, Cooper said. Unless production falls or cold weather bolsters demand, prices will drop to $2.40 per million Btu, and perhaps below $2, as gas overflows storage caverns and clogs pipelines, he said.

This is a situation that has never been seen before, Cooper said. If we hit 2.4 trillion, youre looking at storage capacity constraints by July or August where you literally have system problems because the system is so full.

Oil refiners: Europe runs out of gas, Lex, January 8, 2012 5:45 pm, Financial Times, www.ft.com

Vanishing operating margins and chronic overcapacity. No, not the airline industry. Think Europe’s oil refineries. Petroplus, a Swiss refining company, is dangerously close to collapse. Nine European refineries have closed since mid-2008 and 2.6m barrels a day of refining capacity has been removed from advanced economies since the global financial crisis, according to the International Energy Agency. Moreover, operating margins were negative in November. There could be more casualties ahead.
A decisive shift in the equation of global energy supply, Roger Altman, January 2, 2012, The A-List, Financial Times, www.ft.com

Since the embargo of 1973, there has been a global preoccupation with the centrality of oil, its supply, its cost and the international politics of it. As economies grew and global demand for energy increased, oil and gas exploration and production increasingly moved to distant and politically unstable countries, such as Russia, Iraq, Libya, Iran and Venezuela. At the same time, Opec rose to power; the US military assumed protection of the Persian Gulf; and concerns grew that the world might run out of oil.

This difficult era is now approaching an end, and technology is the main reason. New techniques of exploring and drilling in very deep water and tar sands have been developed. New approaches to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have made it possible to extract deposits of oil and especially gas profitably from shale. The implications are huge. Vast reserves of natural gas are now accessible, and the role of gas in world energy supply is growing fast. Within 25 years, gas should outstrip coal to become the second biggest source of global supply, behind oil. This is positive because gas is much cleaner than coal.