No Roody, it is simply pointing to the idea that predicting the end of the Auto age is swimming up stream. You indicated a glut of road building and I am simply adding the disinchament the elected officials are showing for an alternative to cars and the building of more roads.

It all comes down to what the majority of voters want or are willing to put up with. To sell transpiration to the masses it has to be easier, spontainious, comfortable, and to a degree cater to individual wants.

Cars or personal transportation works because it gives the individual the freedom to leave the house at 7:41 to make it to the movie the person just learned was playing at 8:15 across town. Does that only happen once in a blue moon? Sure but the nature of our fellow citizens is to think of the possibility they might do just that.

Public transportation can meet some of those needs as can cycling. But one makes you dance to their schedule and the other requires physical effort that the majority has time and time again shown they would rather not do.

I just believe it will be close to impossible to change society to the point where the desire for personal possession is replaced.

Ok, now I see what you're getting at. We should really start a different thread about this topic because it's very interesting BUT it is false to assume that just because some moons around gas giant planets are teeming with hydrocarbons, that this makes bringing the energy to Earth and burning it a good idea.

CO2 build-up is only part of the problem. There's also the heat that builds up from both expended energy and deforested areas and objects/buildings that soak up sunlight and release it as convection currents. Ground water evaporates and the convection currents carry it out over the oceans and other cooler areas, where it rains down because it can't rain down in all the areas that have become such hot, high-pressure zones pushing clouds away and drying them up.

Also, new methods for extracting fossil fuels, such as fracking, have unseen effects on underground geography that could come back to bite us, such as by allowing more and more groundwater to drain deeper into the Earth instead of collecting in potable aquifers. I just watched a documentary on California wells being pumped dry so the ground is drying from both the bottom and top. These drought problems aren't caused exclusively by fossil fuel burning, but they are a big part of the cause in many ways, including releasing heat and CO2 as well as stimulating the clearing of land and development into parking lots and buildings that soak up sunlight and release it as heat while reducing the amount of trees to shade and cool the ground so it won't dry out.

This attitude of "change at the convenience of the masses" will only last as long as the artificial GDP economy is maintained. The moment consumer confidence in government-stimulated GDP falters, the system will crash just like any other market and the private sector won't stick their necks out to boost it. At that point, the masses will be begging for change instead of setting conditions for it to happen.

News flash: they are no longer paying to support the highways either. The feds and most states have drastically cut spending. Haven't you been hearing about "crumbling infrastructure"? You should have noticed that half the links you were posting were for reductions in Highway spending, not transit spending. Look at "Mass. transportation" again. This has nothing to do with mass transit--the state of Mass. is not paying as much for highways! The roads here in Michigan literally are crumbling--bad for cyclists and buses as well as cars. This is true for most states in the Union.

BTW, it was you who said there is a glut of road building in your area. This is not the case in most areas. (Nor should it be.)

You're all lecturing and no data. Where is the link on iron to oil?

And no, the luddites were not against progress any more than I am. I don't share their tactics of sabotage, but I do share a desire to shape my own future, not have it determined by others.

Predictions galore from the Rockefeller Foundation:
The New Commute - The Rockefeller Foundation

Interesting, although I must say, I was a little amused at the line that "denser cities promise concrete benefits"

Well I guess I got nothing else except to wait and see if the Auto industry rebounds to 17 0r 18 million by 2020 or if an alternative arives. But if they are only building roads in my area I guess this isn't happening in yours? Special funding as I understand it. https://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...om-state-heres

But as a parting friendly shot I read this today. Relates to alternatives. How Detroit ended up with the worst public transit | Local News | Detroit Metro Times

Fill the forums with meaningless links that no one reads in a silly flame war? NO... not my style. Besides if you had the technical knowledge to understand the science... you already would have read the material. Google does NOT reduce understanding to a single search. Some (many) things require actual knowledge.

You have a belief system/religion already.... and your belief is contrary to facts. It isn't my job to convert you from your beliefs.

The term fossil fuels dates back to the 1500's and refers to the fact that many fossils are found in combination with the coal that it is found with. In other words.... the only fossil fuel is coal. HOWEVER Al Gore (wrongly) co-opted the term to petro fuels. Al also decidedly placed environmentalism under the protection of a religion. So... I assume you are posting in a religious way. I respect your beliefs.

But despite your religious belief that oil and coal are somehow the same thing. Specialized DNA testing has proven without any doubt that oil has NO connection to living organisms.

In other words not a single person has uploaded a page to the searchable google-verse, giving support to the alchemical notion that other elements naturally convert to carbon in the earth's mantle.

I am sure there are thousands! If you can't figure out how to use the search function... maybe you could take a library class.

This has been fun, thanks!

Cooker, Dave's right, this is all way over your head. I've been reading up on it, and despite my background in physics and chemistry, I can't make any sense of it at all.

In fact, they have a name for this super advanced science that we cannot understand, comes up almost immediately in searches. I guess they call it "Pseudoscience".

There are probably some fossilized animals and plants in crude oil too, but that's not really relevant to the meaning of the term 'fossil fuel.' Fossil fuels are fossilized biomass generated by sunlight and/or core heat. Living organisms (producers) convert light (or heat?) energy into chemical energy and the fuels store the energy. So if the fuels store up energy and carbon for millions of years but we burn them at a rate faster than they were/are formed, then they will run out before they recycle into new fuel.

Likewise, if you consider atmospheric CO2 as 'live' carbon, then coal, oil, and natural gas are sequestered forms of 'live' carbon, or you could call them 'fossilized' carbon. I.e. when something is fossilized, it's buried away from the biosphere where it can't affect living systems. Living systems need some energy to function, but too much energy has destructive effects. Every living system functions well with enough energy and breaks down with too much.

Don't be condescending.

It's simple chemistry. If you want to bond a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms together in big molecules, you have to have enzymes to break apart other molecules in a way that allows you to piece the ions together into larger molecules with more potential energy than the starting ingredients. What non-living process converts lower energy molecules into higher energy molecules? Something has to build the hydrocarbons. And regardless of how they're made, releasing the stored energy goes faster than the processes of building it up so if you want to use fuel sustainably, you have to figure out how fast it's being produced and burn it at a slower rate.

Something else to consider is that the Earth's core is gradually cooling. When it solidifies, we will no longer have a magnetic field to protect the biosphere from cosmic rays and other harmful radiation. What's more, water will be able to seep down into the core, draining it from the surface. Earth is going to be much less inhabitable as this happens. So the more we drill and mine and allow water to seep deeper and deeper into the crust, the faster core heat is going to dissipate through the water. Fossil fuels kept underground may end up burning under pressure and help keep the core molten. Nature may have a reason for swallowing up biomass and compressing it underground besides to have people dig it up, burn it above ground, and fill the hole left with water.

Nature doesn't have a reason - things happen because they happen.

Our influence on the cooling of the earth's core is negligible - I wouldn't worry about that. We're far more threatened by its heat (think supervolcano eruption) than we are by its cooling.

You're right. What Dave Cutter is spouting is nothing more than alchemy and pseudoscience.

What I'm saying is that biomass has been sinking down into the Earth for as long as biomass has been growing and it may well be that the living crust has evolved as a mechanism for transporting solar energy to the core, which keeps it hot. We don't want to reach a point in the distant future (and I assume human life to be permaculture barring wholesale holocaust of everyone) where the energy circuit between sunlight and core heat is breached and all the sunlight is just heating the surface while all the water has sunken into the core because it has mostly solidified and hydraulic fracturing has hollowed out pathways deeper and deeper where water can flow into cavities far beneath the surface.

Mars lacks a molten core and thus magnetic field to protect against harmful radiation. It probably has lots of hollow cavities throughout the solid core where water has seeped down. Can you imagine how much energy would be required to pump water from such cavities to the surface? Why would we want to do that on Earth if we can maintain the current system where the molten core basically self-seals any cracks that form in it, which keeps water on the surface? Is it really worth digging up every possible source of core heat, including fossil fuels and radioactive materials when we have plenty of sunlight and solar heat convection currents (wind) available on the surface?

Humans are smart but egoistic. The moment we understand something, we want to harness it for superficial purposes before understanding how it fits into the bigger picture of nature as a vast interconnected system. We figure out gravity compresses old biomass into fossil fuels and we figure out we can extract and burn these fuels to make our own labor easier and perform some neat tricks with previously unimagined concentrations of energy-expenditure. Then the ego takes over and everyone starts competing to put on the most impressive energy show. It's not sustainable. It's not worth destroying the planet. It's a cop out to say it will take 1000s of years for the destruction to be complete. Slow death by a thousand cuts is no better than a quick demise, and arguable worse.

I prefer the term petroleum instead of fossil fuels. I really really doubt that all of the fuel we're burning came from the decomposition of biomass. It just doesn't make sense to me. Especially how such biomass got to be a thousand or so feet underground. Hydrocarbons seem to be produced by the planet. Maybe biomass can be converted into oil in a natural way. What I don't believe is that most of the petroleum on the planet came from it.

I just wish humanity would use more varied fuels that don't create nasty fumes. Human power for local transportation needs to expand a little more. Instead the bellies of humans are expanding.

It's science, people. It has nothing to do with what you "believe". The facts are well established: Petroleum results from hundreds of millions of years of the underground decomposition of single-celled organisms (petroleum) and plants (coal), under conditions of heat and pressure. There is absolutely no scientific or logical doubt about this.

F...A...C...T...S...that's all.

Think! We learned this stuff in seventh grade!

Thank you for an ounce of sanity.