Looming world problem

Ablaz – Yes it is worrying, but people will still need a place to live.

One could easily have taken the same attitude during the cold war – everyone will die through nuclear war, so why invest?

Should nuclear war occur, you’d have nothing. Should it not occur, you’d still have nothing. So on balance it’s better to invest even though the future looks uncertain.

Fuel security is a valid issue. I would suggest further reading on this and other related subjects eg urban planning, transport systems, etc.

Then only buy IPs within walking distance of town (regional centre) or public transport (capital city).

Should the scenario about an oil shortage/higher petrol prices prove correct, you will enjoy capital gains as everyone will be wanting to live in handy, walkable locations.

Regards, Peter

Ablaz,

Yes, those articles can be depressing, for sure. I remember reading about stuff like that over the years, and particularly when I first started reading about it, I became quite down and felt powerless.

With regards to RE, I wrangled with the ethics of it all about a decade ago. I figure if I can charge reasonable rents, do the right thing by tenants, and maybe one day have my own home, then I am not doing anything outside of what I think is ok. I wish there was more public housing, but the government has relinquished its responsibility. For a number of years, I charged rents that were under what the Dept of housing charged, just to ensure I wasn’t being exploitative.

Having said this, the old activist chant of “property equals theft” was said to me the other day by a friend- hehe. I hadn’t heard of it for a while! You can be an activist, and keep your sense of what you think is right and wrong, and still enjoy real estate, I reckon.

My opinion only, of course

kay henry

certainly puts things into perspective. i think we as humans find it difficult to ‘think’ past our own immediate middle class needs. and the wise ones of us that do try and see longer term we tend to ridicule them as drop outs, hippies, alternatives, mystics, intellectuals etc.

we all need to take responsibility for the world and the forst step is to accept that we already have more than enuf to keep us happy and stop being rabbid consumers… (is rabbid a word?)

I first heard of the d-day of fuel consumption about 20 years ago at school. Its not a new issue, nor has it been recently ‘discovered’.

Oil companies know their days are numbered as fuel providers, but that is why they have used (abused) their powers to attain alternative technology and restrict its usage.

Examples such as the Gold Coast inventor who created a 3/4 Water 1/4 Petrol mix engine about 10 years ago had his idea purchased and locked away by the oil companies.

This though doesn’t mean there are no alternatives out there, try science news pages and search for hydrogen engines. Big advances have been made there. Of course the Oil companies are trying to ruin the party, by actually pushing the US government to sponsor Hydrogen research and manufacture by placing a proviso that they can only use oil for the production of Hydrogen, ironic eh?

Electric cars and hybrid technology is currently in theory and practice. Prius (Toyota) is a hybrid car that has been for sale in Australia for about two years or so, it uses an electric motor boosted and recharged by a petrol using unit, even braking recharges the car! Now if they linked solar cells to this vehicle then perhaps even less fuel consumption would be needed. Problems with Electric cars was that they didn’t travel too far before being totally flat.

Interesting that consumption may drop if they include specific technologies such as an aircon unit they developed that ran off even something like human bodyheat.

We have ways to easily navigate around something like that. Of course improved public transport utilising electricity supplied by solar or wind power would remove the majority of the problem in the cities.

I remember, some thirty years ago, a friend was running around trying to find a backer for a Russian scientist (living in Australia) who had designed a method to break up water into Hydrogen and Oxygen and thence use the hydrogen to run a motor on.

My friend tried to set up appointments with many companies but found it very hard going.

One company he got through to arranged a meeting between their scientists and the Russian man where he would set up a demonstration.

The companies’ headchemist came to the meeting and then said ‘the place will blow up, we shouldn’t be involved in this’ whereupon he walked out.

End of demonstration.

Today I read that cars using hydrogen is a reality.

However, I believe that creating Hydrogen isn’t (at the moment) very cost effective i./e. it consumes more energy to run the process than the energy produced by the hydrogen.

I first heard about stories about new energy sources being suppressed some sixty years ago.
Yet, it would be in the oil companies interest to have new sources of energy on tap for when the time comes when the conventional sources (oil) dry up.

I also wonder what the Arabs will do when their source of income dry up ?

Pisces

You could use solar power to do the bulk of the creation of Hydrogen, that way you don’t need to ship any source apart from say water to be split into hydrogen and oxygen. If you maintain an idea like the Prius but use hydrogen instead of petrol for the boosting then you wouldn’t need a large fuel cell for the hydrogen since it is only an auxillary source.

Another system could use a technology that needs to be worked on more that will allow ‘in vehicle’ conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen. For example say you have a large tank full of water in the car, a setup of solar cells in the roof place the excess power to the converter that slowly replaces the lost hydrogen in another quite small tank.

Or ignore the problematic hydrogen issue altogether and just go electric with solar rechargability, you could have ‘cell’ stations that swap out depleted batteries for fully recharged ones as well or offer ‘quickcharge’ facilities instead of petrol stations as we have it now.

Meant to say too, this won’t address the larger types of transport, airlines, intl shipping etc etc. Can’t see them running on hydrogen or electricity.

Back to the sailing ship maybe[biggrin]