To Oil or Not to Oil

[denuseri]

I wasn't making an assumption, just speculating. Check the criticism on that Wiki page you referenced. Granted, it's based on an oil executive's comments, but many of those comments are fairly accurate.

Are they? I think they have been caerfully designed to look that way and defend the intrests of those he works for, some of the points he makes are valid but also misleading and leave out the whole story , they also have holes in them when you look into the details. For instance, one reason we were not exploiting the oil sand approach for so long was the cost of fuel wasn't high enough to validate it. Now as if by magic it is?

In fact, the peak oil hypothesis makes several assumptions which I am skeptical of. They assume that there are no major deposits left to be found, leaving only limited small deposits for the future. I'm not sure how he arrives at that assumption, other than wishful thinking.

It was a careful examination of just how oil is made in the geological proccess of acreation, cross referenced with where its been located, by us and sucked out. Coal, gas and oil both all come from trapped carbonniferous matieral thats been under heat and pressure for long periods of time, there is only so much of it cuase its all made from former living remains, those remains have to be under just right conditions to turn into the resources we are using today, and its takes a longy longy longy time for the earth to make it, and we are sucking it out of the ground at a rate that far far superseeds that natural acreation proccess. The Oil in paticular comes from remains in what used to be swampy coastal regions; know where those were in relationship to the land massess we have today and how they got there and compare it to the location of the current oil fields (The more recent Oil fields located by geologists with increadibly unbelievable accuracy using the same exact method) and you would be surprised at the results of such cross disiplinary efforts. Fractals are a wonderful thing for this kind of reaserch.

But I don't believe that we can continue burning oil at a prodigious rate for the next thousand years, either. In fact I support alternative energy sources, if for no other reason than to minimize CO2 emissions and to minimize oil company profits. But telling the oil companies that they can't drill into known deposits then blaming rising prices on shortages is just nuts. Let the oil companies drill, let them build refineries, and then see how much oil is really there.

Do we Let them make prices go up so they can continue to exploit us? Just so they can get to the more expensive to reach places? Do we let them continue to destroy surface enviroments with abandon like they did all over the third world countries ebfore they got kicked out of them?

Or is it perhaps time to put more money into alternative renewable resources before its too late for us to switch over when we eaither run out of oil and stop letting big oil take us for fools. Its not going to take too much longer at current rates of exponential rescoure exploitation rates to have added so much CO2 to the atmospshere and put so many pollutants into the fresh water supply that we are all quite litterally going to be fucked by ourselves if we are not part of the piveleged wealth holding elite who will be able to wall themselvs off in the enclaves of the future.

A thousand years huh?.....I will give it maby another 2 hundred at best, though in the next 50 I predeict wide spread famine and war over whats left as production continues to decline with no replacments being allowed by the oil and coal lobbies who control our politicians.