Michael Ruppert - Peak Oil, collapse

[kingsam]

USA is sitting on one of the largest known coal pockets in the world, in southern Utah. Shortly after it was found, your president at the time, Clinton, imposed a moritorium on mining there. It's one of the three know places in the world to find clean coal (low ratio of carbon to sulpher). Clean coal produces much less sulpher dioxide (smog) by an order of magnitude. If you're really so concerned about energy shortage, open up the Utah coal fields for mining and you'll be buried in coal for the next 5000 years.

OR stop dependance on fossil fuels and you wont need to dig up half of utah,

wait, oh yeh... too many people make too much money from fossil fuels so it aint gonna happen any time soon!

 

[Drum&Bass]

now that i think about it....seems more like scam than anything.

WE ALREADY HAVE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES

Electric cars

but they were taken off the market because gas companies would lose money.

The country has already been through tough economic times and pulled through.

 

[squirrels]

*cough* invade iran *cough*

Are we even getting any oil out of Iraq??

It's all about profitability.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that BP and Shell are two of the biggest manufacturers of SOLAR PANELS in the world. They know oil is limited.

The problem is that solar, wind, all the other forms of energy, have not been made profitable yet. Meaning the technology has not come far enough yet for those energy sources to be cheap enough to replace oil, or profitable enough.

This WILL happen when either oil goes up in price to intolerable levels or enough research is invested into other energy sources to make them profitable by gaining efficiency.

It WILL happen, though, and it may be painful while it does.

In the meantime, you will see:

-People moving back into cities, giving up on the commuter dream of a house in the suburbs.

-More telecommuting

-More investment in mass transit

There's no quick fix to the oil crisis. We can't switch our cars and trucks and boats over to nuclear power because nuclear reactors are too dangerous for private ownership in most cases. We can't switch to solar or wind power because there's no way you're going to be able to put enough solar panels on a car to power it to where it needs to go.

Ethanol/biodiesel is a nice idea because it's renewable, but every acre of land you use to farm ethanol-corn is an acre you take away from food-corn, and we're already in a food shortage world-wide.

Electric cars are a neat idea...I would love to own (but can't afford yet) a Tesla Roadster. (Google it) But the technology needs to become more efficient...longer-lasting batteries and more powerful, more efficient engines.

Hydrogen is a neat concept, because we're not just burning raw hydrogen, we'd be using nuclear, solar, and other energies to dissociate hydrogen from water and then burning it again to put that water "back into the ecosystem"...essentially, hydrogen/water is just a transport vector for energy. But I'm talking about hydrogen combustion, not those stupid fuel-cell magnetic things they had a while back.

There are options. It's just going to require a lot of time, resources, and money.

And who has those things...and an interest in continuing to strategically place themselves in the energy market of the future?

Big oil.

 

[f283000]

I been telling people for years in this forum that the new world order was going to pull the plug out on america but none of you would listen. I hope you start paying more attention to Alex Jones and the rest of the fellas putting out the truth of what's really going on.

America is finished. Martial law is coming soon.

 

[EA Gold]

Our lives depend on oil. Accept it.

This is just an example of compartementalism, the news and tv have alot to do with it. Meaning they only tell you one part of the truth or lie, and hide the real truth.

Wouldn't it be funny if an actually working mass produceable hydrogen car was made in the 70's and wouldn't it be funnier if a car actually ran on water that was made in the 80's and 90's..

Here's is just some regular guy who was able make one out of his garage. http://www.mobilemag.com/2006/05/31/prototype-car-runs-100-miles-on-four-ounces-of-water-as-fuel/

How hard is it to make this a mass production technology?

 

[j0n24]

I doubt martial law will happen that would only increase strain on the financial and economical aspects of the population not to mention putting pressure right on the population.

That would mean we would have to first pull almost all of our armed forces out of foreign countries.
2nd they would have to approve a draft to increase the military to actually enforce martial law on the ENTIRE US.
3rd. If they do sanction martial law on the entire US that would mean MASSIVE job losses and the economy would come to a stand still.

Saying we would be in martial law would be extremely rare and I doubt that will ever happen, MAYBE a draft to boost up military mass so they could if anything happens control the population.

I just think it's funny that instead of the oil spill that people rarely talk about anymore for some reason they are now BACK ON breast cancer.

IF you watch the news most networks push breast cancer news as opposed to anything else.

 

[SoldMySoul]

A good friend of mine keeps on telling me I need to get this guy's book, Crossing The Rubicon! After that and seeing this post, I am going to.

 

[Quiksilver]

OR stop dependance on fossil fuels and you wont need to dig up half of utah,

wait, oh yeh... too many people make too much money from fossil fuels so it aint gonna happen any time soon!

Yes I agree, civilisation isn't perfect and our dependence on fossil fuel is terrible. However, if we shut down all fossil fuel powered technology today, aside from a few pockets of nuclear power, we would be living in the stone age tomorrow. Do you want that?

My contention is that once we start extracting H3 from the moon, we will have working and efficient fusion reactors within two decades. We probably would have been close to having a working model right now, except the quantities of H3 on earth useable for experiments is staggeringly low. You can't test and run trial and error with no raw materials.

 

[jonwon]

Humans haven't been around very long in the scheme of things and we are definitely reaching some critical times. Peak oil, the computer singularity, global warming and the global possession of nuclear bombs. You have nothing to base that statement on. 99% of species become extinct. Humans aren't so special.

Jesus Wolf how are you not grey?

For starters globel warming is nothing but a political con trick.
As for nuclear bombs, yeh thats a fuc*er, but seriously is it all doom and gloom?

We are far from wiping ourselves out, and anyone who believes we are contributing to climate change and heating the planet up, is a potential fruit nut in my book.

As for peek oil, unsure but this sort of shi* is played out on the financial stage all the time, global warming for example, the great carbon credit scam! Plenty of men getting rich of that con, and plenty of men will get rich from a scarcity projection too.

I like to think the most basic logical reason is the most fitting and alot of people can make money out of this, and when it comes to these things there is always ALWAYS a money trail.

I detest personnally the green lobby types who do little research and want to send us all back to the stone age, or stand making silly suggestions about green tech -

The simple fact of the matter is oil is very much a part of life and no matter how many green minded brainwashed like to think, its not going to go away, hence why the people who really count know this and have invested heavily into carbon credit companies and pushed the carbon credit agenda, which is now big business.

I dont believe anything that has a vested interest, or the product of scare tactics.

I'm an avid reader of Allan Watts (watts up with that), who will rather easily dubunk all the green marxist cra* -

Also the reason why oil is so expensive is more down to the stocks and buying and selling the oil whilst its off shore on tankers than the actual shortage of oil - Its big business and before it even gets to pumps for example its probably passed through the hands of at least 7 companies - with the price going up each time. Companies are renown to keep oil off the market to inflate its cost, to create a scare tactic where by people feel that oil is scarce when it is not is definatly big business and will help push the price of oil up ever higher - Dont do the work for them. Why keep the oil out at sea when all you sheep believe its running out or is about to?

I dont believe we will run out of oil anytime soon and especcially not in my lifetime - and after that we should have tech - to compensate from some of the dependance.

Anyway the green shrills dont even like nuclear power, hence WTF would these fools have us living like? I suggest those types, hitch up and go get a shack somewhere, if your that concerned.

Take Al-Gore for example - The global waming man, who incidently has a carbon footprint the size of a small town.

I dont know the guy in the video, but these sorts of things for me just get turned off, if I encounter it constantly I do a bit of research and when all is said and done, always without fail a money trail is revealed.

The sort of people who believe in this sort of thing is exactly the target audiance of this type of stuff - The type of person who believes the planet is over-populated, we are going to kill ourselves with nuclear bombs, the planet is warming up and sea levels are rising (stupid seriously). The type of people 10 years ago, you'd laugh at whilst they stood on a street corner with a sign saying "the world is nigh" - Please for the love of all things logical and sane, do some dam research - look behond the screen and you'll see the elaborate con it is and its always a con, always!

I'd like to wake up one morning and all this scare shi* is wiped out, sanity returns and people start enjoying the fact that we live in good times and celebrate the fact that we have progressed to such a state where we can effectivly party in the street over our accomplishments, but we cant because green shrills believe we are destroying ourselves and the world - I'd personnally, like to round the fuc*ers up and stick them on an island surrounded by daisys and let them bore each other to death, whilst the rest of us live in relative luxary that our fellow man has created for us. Why not simply Enjoy it?

Just a few seconds on google brings up a shed load of shi* on this guy:

http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/09/115-mike-ruppert-peak-oil-stooge.html

http://anti-doomer.blogspot.com/2008/12/holding-michael-ruppert-responsible.html

http://www.gasresources.net/Lynch(Hubbert-Deffeyes).htm

http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2006/07/307-confessions-of-ex-doomer.html

 

[wolf116]

Yes, it seems to me that the future existence of humans is not at all cretin. The views of those I respect most are of the same opinion. Namely, Noam Chomsky, Martin Rees, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. Which I don't think can be dismissed so easily. Especially that of Chomsky's, as there is no way in the world that this guy has been compromised. This is a guy who has spent his life, risked his job and his freedom working to rip down corporate and political power structures.

I am definitely not part of hippie crowd who want to solve the worlds problems by regressing to a stone age like civilization. That can never happen without some sort of mass culling. It’s also against the human sprit to move back into a society that is less intellectually stimulating, dangerous and uncomfortable. We will also need that technological infrastructure to artificially cool the globe (whether humans heated it or not) to keep it habitable, cure horrible torturous diseases, colonize space, or to say deflect a fatal meteorite. I think technology and science developed for humanity -through democracy- instead of for corporate wealth is the only way to achieve this.

From what I’ve read I’m fairly certain that global warming is occurring and will have devastating effects. Peek oil I’m not so sure of, but regardless, the industry is corrupt, it’s causing countless deaths and atrocities and is a massive power structure that has direct control over government. Burning it is also making our city air unbreathable. I agree with you about nuclear power, but only as a short term fix until something like solar, geothermal or wind is cost effective. See, those draw heat from the planet where a planet run on nuclear power adds a phenomenal amount of heat to the system.
Nuclear war seems to be the most immediate danger though, as the world as already been on the brink of total nuclear war. It’s been predicted that this would cause a nuclear winter colder than the ice age.
Not to mention biological warfare.

Don’t worry about me going grey I live a very stress free life out of the rat race. I’m just trying to educate myself so I can get involved in some positive activist work to do my little bit in contributing to making this world a better place.
Recommend your favourite Allan Watts book to me and in return I recommend ‘Understanding Power’ by Noam Chomsky.

 

[Razor Sharp]

Okay for starters, Martial Law is NOT going to happen. Forget about Alex Jones and what any other nutbags tell you. There simply are not enough soliders or police to control everyone, they will be too busy guarding precious resources and crucial strategic points to patrol your backyard. State governments all over the country are REDUCING the police force right now, that is the reality.

Are we even getting any oil out of Iraq??

We have built one of the world's largest (and most permanent) military bases. Trust me, we are sitting right on top of that oil, and we aint going anywhere.
http://www.computerweekly.com/PhotoGalleries/235121/779_30_Camp-Anaconda-US-Airbase.jpg

we'll have developed stable fusion reactors with H3 from the moon long before we run out of useable hydrocarbons.

You do realize that without the petroleum fuel the production, or the economy to support it, pretty much all nuclear reactors will go the way of the dodo, right? Once it costs more energy to produce the means which create energy you can forget about anyone investing, the numbers just don't add up. Look at our space program and how much is being cut back - that is no coincidence when you think of just how much fuel is required for these missions.

Anyone who doubts that we are past peak oil production need only look at Saudi Arabia, which sits on 25% of the planet's known oil reserves, started offshore drilling years ago. The fact that today these installations are constructed further away at sea is very telling. If we still had so much oil, why the f*ck would we be drilling miles underwater? Do you realize how expensive that is?

Again, the cost of construction will exceed the profits reaped from the resources gained.

The deeper you have to go underwater, the more it costs to drill, not to mention the fact that creating a stable platform which sucks up flammable liquid through miles of earth and raging currents is an engineering nightmare which inevitably leads to disaster. The Gulf of Mexico is pretty calm compared to the middle of the ocean, and look how well that has worked out. People who think we can just drill more of the ocean do not understand basic economics or mechanics.

We have all been sold a lie of infinite growth. Nowhere in nature or science can such a paradigm exist. If you follow the history of past civilizations, they also crumbled when they exceeded the capacity of their resources, and very quickly at that! The Mayans lost 90% of their population in ten years, and they were a very advanced civilization for at least 5 centuries. We are already seeing birth rates decline in various countries after decades of rampant growth. If you can't see the handwriting on the wall, then I'm sorry but you deserve to be wiped out with the rest of those who fail to adapt. That's just how nature works.

Yes it is true there are alternatives, but people forget that in order for them to be viable you need INFRASTRUCTURE, and that takes a long time. The longer we wait to go green, the more disastrous the results will be as our existing system crumbles. Aside from progressive states like Oregon and California, you dont really see this type of movement, everyone else is doing too little too late. People still operate under the assumption that our resources are unlimited, and that is a fatal mistake!

Electric cars are nice in theory, but that electricity has to come from somewhere. As cool as wind and solar energy are, the problem is with storing and transmitting that energy. To date no one has figured out how to do this effectively, at least not to support the current demand which is constantly growing.

We had the opportunity to evolve 100 years ago when Nicola Tesla proposed a system of free energy, which fed off the ionosphere and delivered wirelessly (and for free) to anyone with an antenna. His main investor, JP Morgan promptly fired and blacklisted him once he learned of his plan to distribute free energy. Typical.

Our only hope is that someone as brilliant as Tesla is able to reproduce such a system, but even that would take decades to produce on a mass scale. And there is no guarantee that it wouldnt be suppressed in favor of something more destructive and profitable.

Of course you guys can all breathe a sigh of relief. If anyone has to deal with this problem, it probably wont be us, it will be our children.

I'm not a doomsayer or consipracy theorist. I just calls it as I sees it, and am prepared for anything. I know how to fire a gun and have a small arsenal. I have reserves of basic necessities (food, first-aid), I know how to farm, fish and hunt, and am very active in my community. With those basics covered I do not worry about the end of the world.

In the meantime I live day by day and try to enjoy every minute of it. Life is too short to live in fear

 

[j0n24]

Some of your sayings are funny

They mayans you bring them up?

Most of the indian population were destroyed because of Spanish/English exploration into the US and got messed up by disease. I dont remember hearing the mayans getting destroyed because they used up all their resources .

Global warming doesnt exist either, the world was a hell of a lot hotter when the dinosaurs roamed the earth ...its just evolution of the earth. Doomsdayers are always trying to scare the population that we are all going to die soon....Next year all your going to hear is everyone say
"Yup were going to be all dead in 2012."

 

[Upside]

Thank you J0n, at least some people understand. The world isn't go to impolde. The rapture isn't coming. The illuminati aren't going to control us using mind control. Just keep living your life the best you can givin the circumstances. No one, and i mean NO ONE can predict what is going to happen 5 or 10 years down the line. Maybe we will discover some new energy source more abundant, cleaner, and cheaper than oil. It can happen. Or maybe World War III will break out. Stop worrying about it and live your life.

I'll go back to watching my sports and playing my video games now.

 

[Razor Sharp]

Glad I amuse you

The indigenous population of the mayan CITIES were destroyed by conquistadors. That has nothing to do with the majority of the population which thrived in rural areas. Granted it is unfair to say that their entire civilization collapsed because in the urban sense is still existed well into the 1600s. But archeologists have documented how over-ambitious farming and a strained ecosystem brought much of this once great empire to its knees. Some experts cite droughts as the demise, but they fail to recognize that under normal circumstances, when the land is not pushed past its capacity - they would not have had such a devastating effect. Much of the land was deserted long before the Spanish ever touched the New World. When they did they faced thousands of Mayans, but that is nothing compared to the estimated tens of thousands that once thrived there.

I also agree that global warming is a complete hoax and that 2012 is nothing more than a calendar reboot. (no more disastrous than moving from december to january)

 

[j0n24]

I've never heard that before when talking about the mayans but I know what you mean about continuous farming destroying the soil. Hmm i'll have to check that out when I read about the mayans again.

Plus just wait for a couple of months or years, 2012 is coming and mexico city is sinking so they will try to combine both into the apocalypse.

 

[DanelMadr]

money trail...he is selling DVDs and doing consulting for doomsday tactics

Rome collapsed because it was rotten. No real democracy...no real feedback. People loose confidence in the state and economy and it goes to hell. Also you need the trade alive, you have to protect the routes, which Rome also neglected in the end.
And you need economy backed up by producing real goods. Not just services and borrowing money to buy bling.

What I don't like about his presentation
....modern economy is about expectations....when you think it is going to hell then it will no matter of how much good and worthy stuff the economy produces.

He just gave up. It is bullcr@p. Even if shyt hits a fan the society does not have to go chaos. Not over night. And you can do many things. You put knife on throat of azzhole countries who make their living by blackmailing western democracies. Their policy is"The worse the better." because they hate free societies or because they sit on gas and oil.

You can built another oil depo out of Louisiana in a week when you really want (and pay).

You can go 70 years back...not everyone had a car. My grandparents lived very poorly especuially after WW2 but they managed. Yes there were not so many people then but the food was aslo more scarce. They never been out of their country for vacation. It sucks but it can be done.

I believe when we really need to have something instead of oil....we will find a solution like very fast. People always work best when it is absolutely necessary.
And I think it is not now.

Just don't loose faith and work for the best.
What we need is to shut the azzholes up....defense budget to guard the trade routes is sooo big. I belive they will back off when they see determination to kick them. Make financial market more transparent. And cut down on spending and feeding lazy people.

If I am mistaken and the collapse is inevitable and my government is useless, well, all you can do is to buy a tent, make a bow and chop some wood anyway. So I suggest go out tomorrow, buy a tent, an axe, make a bow and since you are ready you can start trying to make things work better by joining the army, politics or setting up some np BS business.

 

[taiyuu_otoko]

money trail...he is selling DVDs and doing consulting for doomsday tactics

Correct. He tipped his hat when he mentioned that he hadn't received any "income" from all the pirating of his DVD.

What I don't like about his presentation
....modern economy is about expectations....

Right you are. As I mentioned before, oil futures more than a year out are at about 90 bucks a barrel. Not that different from day. Despite the doom and gloomers, the raw financial markets are eerily accurate when predicting future economic conditions.


I also find it interesting how he equates "oil" with population growth, as if oil somehow "caused" the massive growth in population. It is likely the other way around. Massive population represents a massive market for whatever people want to sell. People drilling for oil simply started drilling more and more to sell oil to more and more people. That they happened at the same time is maybe coincidental, or maybe because humans have a way of always creating new stuff and new technology.

In the sixties and seventies, people were certain that the world population would all my dead due to an inability to provide food for everybody.

Since then, there has been tons of innovative technology created to both grow and distribute far more efficiently than before. Don't underestimate the creative power of humans to take care of each other, provided there is a free market framework in place to reward those that come up with the best ideas.

And don't think for second the U.S. military isn't acutely aware of any potential shortages in oil. Wars have been lost due to inaccessibility to fuel, just as the germans and the japanese.

I doubt the largest military the world has ever known is sitting on it's hands hoping somebody comes up with a solution.

We humans will be fine. The whole of human history is a story of innovation that has led to more technology, longer life spans, better medicine, larger populations living in relative peace, and many easy ways to make money.

Some people just like to make money telling everybody else how fukked we are, tapping into our primeval tendency to be motivated by fear much more than a desire for pleasure and happiness.

Like I said before, if you really think something big is going to go down in the realm of oil supply, you can make a killing in the futures market by either shorting or going long crude.

 

[Quiksilver]

I think technology and science developed for humanity -through democracy- instead of for corporate wealth is the only way to achieve this.

Yes.

And if you looked at the Copenhagen Treaty, it was supposedly to tackle climate change, and was the most undemocratic/authoritarian/draconian treaty I've ever read.

As part of it's method of tackling climate change, it was to create in conjunction with the IMF an authority that would essentially govern the energy usage of every nation and every human in the western world. Okay ... It was to be an unelectable, unquestionable, dizzyingly powerful (would skim 2% of GDP from all countries into the coffers of the IMF per year), and strangely vague (Copenhagen treaty did not divulge what would be done with the money), and had no set time frame for it's dictatorial powers. Is that the sort of world you want to live in, in the name of tackling a problem that a) We are not even sure will affect us to a noticeable degree b) that we could stop anyways c) that would do more harm to stop than to simply adapt to change?

Climate has been changing for 4.6 billion years, at rates much higher than it is changing today. Carbon in atmosphere has been 20,000 times higher than it is today, a statistic that our carbon footprint will not hit for another 220 million years at current rates and we survived, right now the atmosphere is particularly carbon-starved as most of it has literally been locked in stone, etc etc etc.

We can joust about this all afternoon, down to the very roots of whether anthropogenic global warming is even occurring at all (of which I have overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

-----

It is likely the other way around. Massive population represents a massive market for whatever people want to sell. People drilling for oil simply started drilling more and more to sell oil to more and more people. That they happened at the same time is maybe coincidental, or maybe because humans have a way of always creating new stuff and new technology.

Look at it the other way around ... If 95% of oil suddenly vanished from the planet, how many would die? All urban areas and almost all suburban areas depend on oil powered trucks to deliver food to the markets. How much of the grain harvest would shut down overnight? Can you commute to work without oil? If oil "winks out", you could easily see a 90% population reduction within a year, simply due to almost no one living a sustainable lifestyle without it. And those who are, would be overwhelmed by those who aren't. You already know my views on oil ... That there is enough oil down there that is easily retrievable to allow us to develop technologies to access the not-so-easily-retrievable oil in the future. Look at a map of the globe, 3/4 of earth is covered by water ... How much oil is down below those oceans? Go ask the gulf of mexico.

-----

now that i think about it....seems more like scam than anything.

WE ALREADY HAVE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES

Electric cars

I agree, it is a bit of a scam. That's not to say we should be wasteful, or that there won't be a shortage eventually.

The issue with electric cars is ... What is building those electric cars? What is storing the electricity? What builds the electric motors? What builds the batteries? Oil / Coal / Nuclear powered technology.

It's the same issue with solar power. If you can't use solar power to build a solar panel from scratch, then it's not an efficient power source.

 

[Inquisitus]

The issue with electric cars is ... What is building those electric cars? What is storing the electricity? What builds the electric motors? What builds the batteries? Oil / Coal / Nuclear powered technology.

It's the same issue with solar power. If you can't use solar power to build a solar panel from scratch, then it's not an efficient power source.

If everybody had that attitude, nothing would get done. Why do you need to peg your goal so high at the start?

You need to start somewhere, even if it isn't as efficient as you want. As economy of scale & competition kicks in, the cost of production will drop. Prices will drop and usage will grow. You will eventually get critical mass so that you can use alternative energy to produce alternative energy products.

Also, generation of energy at a plant will be way more efficient due to economies of scale than generating at point of use. You can equip plants with machinery to clean their own waste. You can put co-generation technology that essentially re-uses waste heat to generate more electricity. That type of equipment would be too big and expensive to fit on something like a car or truck.

You gotta walk before you run. There's not going to be a magic bullet that will solve peak oil or global warming. It will come down to how it always does, humanity relentlessly grinding away at it until things get better.

 

[synergy1]

The issue with electric cars is ... What is building those electric cars? What is storing the electricity? What builds the electric motors? What builds the batteries? Oil / Coal / Nuclear powered technology.

Electric cars have been raved as the future since Edisons time. A pure electrical car won't happen. why? the battary technology is still insufficient.

Lets talk about where batteries come from. You need rare earth elements which are exclusively from one country, china (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rare-earths.gif. It is estimated that between 95% and 100% of these elements come from China with trace amounts coming from Argentina and Chile. the united states has one mine for rare earths. So we talk about OPEC and weaning ourselves off foreign oil for "energy independence" yet we all embrace going towards something where one country has a monopoly.

Brilliant.

now lets talk about battery technology. In short , the energy density is a joke. You get more energy burning used tires than you get from batteries. And how do you charge those batteries? Oh, that's right, whatever is on the grid. As of now, Coal is a whopping 41% of our total energy generation ( BP statistical review of world energy). So plugging in is burning coal which is creating massive amounts of sludge!

It's the same issue with solar power. If you can't use solar power to build a solar panel from scratch, then it's not an efficient power source.

Solar suffers from a similar ill to electric cars. the storage via the battary. Since its not always on, you need a backup to kick in when the sun isn't out - it would be different if people were 'ok' with periodic times with power and periodic blackouts. They also require rare earths to build which is why we see solar companies coming from china. Solar also suffers from poor energy density; its 8 times less effective on a Watt per meter squared basis than nuclear ( nuclear is 47 times more effective on the same basis than wind).

If 95% of oil suddenly vanished from the planet, how many would die?

No, but the quality of life we have all come to enjoy would go down the toilet. A study was done which correlated the quality of life to the energy a nation was able to produce. Who was on top? The U.S ranking in at 3366 watts per capita which blows away #2, china at 673 W/C. The correlation is simple; the more energy capabilities a country has, the better off its citizens are.

I won't speculate what would happen if we lost oil. But think of oil as the reason why everything you have around you exists. Plastics, food sterilization, transportation, houses, buildings, internet..you name it. Are you all ready to give up those luxuries?