LOEI UNIVERSITY BARRY GANSAM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2013
PAGE 4
opinion
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
To the person who said there was no "woo." that is because there are less than 1000 fans remaining, by the end (trust me I was one of them)
Shout out to the Women's Track team for making history AND doing something K-State fans only dream of... winning a National Championship! That makes I3 total, RCJH!
Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351 or at kansan.com
Live like a Jayahwak squirrel: have no fear when meeting people on campus.
Trying to find food to eat at Mrs. E's is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. #glutenallergies
The Constitution is like our football stadium: just because it's old and we still use it doesn't mean it's good
If we put an escalator for the hill, our calves would return to a normal size! God save us all!
15500000
Napping in the halls of Budig. Don't look at me.
I threw a boomerang like six years ago and it never came back. Now I live in constant fear.
PSA: Silence your phones if you decide to study in Watson Library. The rest of us are trying to sleep.
I feel like Anschutz would be a better place for that Panda Express.
I threw up at El Mez. Sorry bout it
What's Hanson's disease? It's when you have a bad taste in music.
The adventures of the McCollum red morph suit guy continues.
The only good thing about frat packs is that you can hide from flier people by standing behind them.
Yayyy! People are so nice, returning my keys and all.
My professor just used slides, and not PowerPoint slides like picture slides with a carousel and everything
ENERGY
Only in Pearson Schol hall would chicken fingers be a side dish to chicken sandwiches #foodpyramid
My roommate's incredibly hot girlfriend is literally laying on top of him while he's awkwardly trying to ignore her and find ways to play World of Warcraft anyway. I don't understand this.
World oil supply is less endangered than public believes
Every now and then, there is concern that the world is running out of oil. It is not new, and it is founded on legitimate trends. People demand higher standards of living, and that requires crude oil. And of course, the world's population is increasing. Most importantly, based on different oil origination theories, it is a safe assumption that the Earth's oil resources are effectively finite. These big-picture facts set the stage for a doomsday scenario: The world is running out of oil.
For many, this supports a call for immediate, sometimes drastic, policy action. If strong government intervention isn't taken, the private sector - with a short-term point of view - will be unable to meet future energy demand. How can oil companies - at the mercy of their shareholders every fiscal quarter - make long-term energy decisions that impact future generations? That's a valid concern, but despite calls for nationalization of U.S. oil resources, the vast majority of the world's fossil fuels
They cannot. While government guidance and regulation is completely necessary to provide a long-term plan for the energy future, and admitting that nationalization has helped many oil-producing regions, the global energy industry cannot be centrally planned. That is important-oil is the lifeblood of the global economy. A combination of competition, regulation, oil firms and entire nations must work together to address energy issues.
are not in the hands of any U.S. company. Well, how can foreign national oil companies interested in their own country's well-being make long-term energy decisions that impact the global energy future?
But "running out of oil" is not one of those issues. The world is not running out of oil. The doomsday scenario that finite energy supplies will be exhausted by ever-increasing energy demand is a simplified view of the oil market. It assumes that oil-consumer and producer behavior will not change, regardless of price.
That assumption flies in the face of classical economic considerations. As price increases, consumers begin considering alternatives to oil and consider reducing their consumption. Producers are incentivized to produce oil that may have been uneconomic at lower prices. As the price of oil reaches $200 a barrel, firms are able to produce oil that was not profitable at $100 a barrel. Additionally, there is market incentive to innovate and find suitable alternatives.
The proof is in the numbers. World oil reserves total somewhere around 1526 billion barrels. The world consumes nearly 88 million barrels a day, or somewhere around 32 billion barrels
a year. Does this mean that the world will run out of oil in about 50 years? No. If you trend oil "reserves" historically, the world has had 40-50 years of reserves for many more years than 50 years. Why? As the price of oil makes oil exploration economic, oil discoveries replace consumption. By definition, the nomenclature "reserves" includes the idea of economic production-it is not fixed.
Some critics of this perspective might claim that demand for oil is inelastic, meaning that the demand for oil will not change regardless of price. In the short run, they might be correct, but there has been historical precedent for the substitution of energy sources. In the 1800s, whale oil was used extensively in the United States to light oil lamps. But, eventually, due to the same market forces that I just described, kerosene replaced whale oil in the 19th century.
Immediately, it seems that there is no replacement for oil. However, I doubt the largest supporters of whale oil could foresee the
refining of crude oil into kerosene as a replacement product for their whale oil. I seriously doubt that they could have predicted that gasoline, another product of refining that was initially discarded in favor of just kerosene, would become a dominant transportation fuel, or that natural gas would begin to supplant coal.
No one can see 50 or 100 years down the energy road, and many are uncomfortable with that. It becomes very hard to politically plan to secure the energy future. But derailing the energy discussion with constant chatter of "running out of oil" is irresponsible. That effort would be much better spent understanding the competitiveness of substitute resources, preferably ones that are renewable and carbon neutral, and the ways those resources can be brought to market without handicapping economic growth.
FOOD
Chris Ouyang is a senior studying petroleum engineering and economics from Overland Park.
Students display a wide spectrum of cooking ability
Cooking is a lot like driving a car. When you start out, nobody wants to be your first passenger, and when you get really good, you suddenly become a chauffeur. There are the people who want to drive everywhere and show off their car, and the ones who never feel the need to learn to drive because they have friends who give rides freely. And where do I fit in? I tend to be that person whose car collects dust in the parking lot because I have the skills to use it, but rarely feel like taking the time or effort to do so.
In less metaphorical terms, I can cook, but I choose not to.
Maybe I was misinformed by my mom's old college stories, but I thought that was how most college students cooked. They made easy, mostly-already-prepared meals and coasted through their culinary cuisine with a sort of limp. But then, maybe that was wrong, because all of my friends seem to actually cook.
This is probably a good time to mention that my view on cooking is a little skewed. Living in a scholarship hall at KU, it's not at all unusual to be surrounded by people who enjoy and excel at cooking. Most of the time, it's a good thing, but every now and then I feel like my pizza snacks and cheese-filled tortillas are being observed with a bit of condescension. I feel bad, even a little ashamed – that is until I talk to some of my friends with
apartments.
One of them bragged to me that they had eaten nothing but ramen noodles for the last two weeks. Another laughed and said that Easy Mac was about the highest level of meal they ever cooked unless they were having some sort of party, and then they added chips. Yeah, you could say I felt a little better after that.
All of this got me to thinking that there really ought to be a guide for how to survive on your most comfortable level of cooking. To make it nice and user friendly, I decided to give it a number system. The higher the number, the more likely you are to cook. We'll start with the ambitious people, shall we?
MASTER CHEF: Since we're all college students, I'm counting anyone who makes meals that involve spices.
means that you've spelled
actual recipes and experimentation
in this category. My advice is
to broaden your horizons. Is there
a particular food that you've never attempted to cook before? Find a friend who excels at a certain food and learn from them. Bonus
FILE PHOTO/KANSAN
points if the food is from another culture - you'll learn about different parts of the world and have a delicious meal.
GETTING BY: You can cook, and sometimes you do. You make things like meat, and you even think about including fruits and vegetables sometimes (the kind that don't come out of the can). You buy a lot of food you don't have to prepare (like fresh fruit, bagels and cream cheese) and your maximum cooking effort involves putting some sort of protein on a
bread product. You also mix the food together in this new thing you created called a recipe. It usually has two ingredients. Even so, you try to eat all of the food groups (most of the time), and you try not to eat the same meal more than five times a week.
1 YES, THE GROCERY STORE IS MANDATORY. If you're in this stage and you're still reading this article, it's probably because you were hoping for some new secret about how to do less cooking than you already manage. Well, I'm sorry to say that unless
you don't mind spending all of your money and gaining a few dozen pounds, you can't eat all of your meals through fast food. Eventually you'll actually venture to the grocery store, even if it is just to buy 100 individual packages of ramen. Good luck my cooking-challenged friends.
Anna Wenner is a junior majoring in English from Topeka.
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