Your original statement, that you smashed the basic premise of Card's article, is flat out absurd. Your statement relies upon two premises: first, that you identified Card's basic premise and responded to it, and second, that your response "smashed" that premise.
On that first point, Card's basic premise was that commerce and trade are only possible when there is a strong military presence available to keep the peace. Without peace and stability it isn't safe to send goods to market, so trade will suffer. Without trade it isn't possible for anyone to specialize in the production of the goods that give us our incredible standard of living, which we all take for granted today.
That is only half of his premise. The second half that you leave out, is that the barbarians pose enough of a threat to bring a halt to the flow of oil. Another foundational peice of his argument, is that the terrorists will spread from Iraq to neighboring nations and combined with the stoppage of the flow of crude oil, they will collapse the world economy.
My first response shows that this necessary part of his argument is untrue, or at least greatly exaggerated. Hence the rest of his argument falls apart (hence, smashed). Of course, you have pointed out my assumption that the change posed by barbarism will take over 'gradually' (5-10yrs). His article is also written in those terms. For example: his use of the Roman fall, and the precipitating action is the spread of war from Iraq to neighboring nations.
Your original post has absolutely no bearing on this notion that peace enables trade, that without peace there will be no commerce to prop up our standard of living. Your post merely touches upon some far-fetched alternative energy sources.
On that second point, your post (which doesn't even bear upon Card's basic premise) is largely incorrect. It does nothing to "smash" the idea that a sudden loss of crude oil from the middle east would be catastrophic. Of the alternatives listed, CTL is the only one that's ever been used on an industrial scale before. The rest are largely unproven. GTL is still a pipe dream. Fischer Tropsche requires massive energy input as well as a feed stock of hydrocarbons, thus making it impractical for anything except converting one fossil fuel into another at great expense. Nuclear power is a Good Thing, but it's an electrical power generation thing, not a source of liquid vehicle fuel. Wind, solar, bio fuel are all impractical as anything more than a supplement to our existing liquid fuel sources.
Sure, over time we could transition to alternative sources of fuel. From an engineering standpoint, it's technically possible for perhaps CTL to provide our liquid vehicle fuels (reserving all of our coal productions for that purpose) and perhaps use nuclear and wind and solar to pick up the burden for electrical power production.
The obvious flaw you overlook is that it isn't just technical engineering know-how that we need in order to use an alternative fuel source. More important than the technical aspect is the infrastructure aspect. Our economy has spent the last century building up the massive infrastructure needed to make gasoline universally available. If we were to transition away from gas, a massive new set of infrastructure would have to be built to replace it or convert it over to use for the new fuel. Infrastructure improvements require capital investment, and lots of it. Massive capital investment is only possible in the presence ofa strong economy. Even if we tried to make the transition right now, when times are as goo as they've ever been, and even if we threw our entire national effort into the transition process, I doubt we could accomplish it in less than 5 or 10 years.
If the supply of crude from the middle east drops off slowly, then we could adapt along with it and make the transition to an alternative. But if the supply is cut off suddenly, then we're screwed. We can't simply switch over to CTL or whatever on a moments notice. It isn't like flipping a light switch.
Card is right. If there's a political upheaval in the middle east that suddenly cuts off the supply of crude, economies will fail. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and probably China will crash immediately. Europe will struggle to hold on, and will probably fail. The US will struggle to hang on, and will probably succeed. Within a year or two, the global GDP will be reduced to half or a third of what it once was. The struggle to recover under those circumstances will be long and hard. The struggle to recover under those circumstances while trying to lay out the infrastructure to transition away from crude oil will be monumentally difficult, if not impossible.
At best it's a worldwide depression that dwarfs the Great Depression. At worst it's the end of the modern world and the beginning of the next dark age.
Far fetched?
http://www.billingsgazette.com/newdex.php?display=rednews/2005/08/02/build/state/25-coal-fuel.inchttp://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/HE23Cb06.htmlMontana, Wyoming, China - they all want a plant, they see the $$$. And the capital is already being raised.
Pipe dream? (I hope that was a pun)
http://www.sasol.com/sasol_internet/frontend/navigation.jsp?articleTypeID=2&articleId=11200003&navid=4&rootid=4Like I said before, Card never said anything about a sudden loss of oil. Which I agree would be catastrophic. Rather, he was talking about a regional transition over several years. I also agree that enforceable peace is necessary for economic growth and stability. But, his argument relied on more assumptions than just that one axiom.
Saying that F-T requires a massive amount of energy is misleading. It depends on how you run the system. If you run from coal, you produce both fuel and net electricity producer, same with Natural Gas. If you run from nuclear or solar cell, then the energy required is only slightly more than the splitting of hyrdogen, which has been the fad solution, despite its huge problems.
Second, there would be NO INFASTRUCTURE CHANGE. Gasoline is gasoline, diesel is diesel. Actually, FT produces cleaner and more powerful diesels and gasolines since they are 'neat' fuels (pure) with very high cetane and octane ratings with none of those nasty aromatics, respectively. For diesel, the only additive you need is some biodiesel to increase lubricity back to spec (very important for fuel system longevity). Many other products are produced as well, but they can be cracked or sold to the plastics section, or sold as LP fuel.
Finally, for Card to be right; then the barbarism would have to spread to the more important producer/consumer countries in the world as I listed out in the other post. Like I said, all but western europe will defend themselves quite well against the barbars at the gate. And who knows, maybe the Francs will get a clue, and pull up some old Charles the Hammer courage.
Drew
