Sala Seminarios IFIC (Edf. Institutos de Investigación) Lunes, 18 de Octubre de 2010 a las 11:00 AM
Resumen
Todays way of life in the richer countries is based on the use of huge amounts of energy in various forms. This energy is coming mostly from the burning of the limited and non renewable oil, gas and coal reserves. Most development scenarios for the next decades of our civilization assume that an annual worldwide growth in the resource use of a few % per year is unavoidable. While it is widely accepted that oil and other resources are indeed finite, most international organizations pretend that resource limits will not become a problem during for the next couple of decades.
However, more and more people start to doubt that the imagined continuous growth of energy usage can continue for much longer. Such views are supported by actual data which show than many oil and gas rich areas are in rapid decline today. Thus, the idea that worldwide supplies of oil and gas are soon approaching a terminal decline, which will be followed by similar coal and uranium resource constraints, is spreading fast.
In this talk we will confront ``business as usual" ideas about the coming decades with the latest data about especially oil and uranium resources
and explain why nuclear fusion will always be at least 50 years away. Finally some ideas and imaginations about future civilizations functioning with much less available energy will be outlined.
