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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (43883)	5/12/2004 12:08:56 PM
From: Valley Girl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793926

This is both true and untrue. All this shows is that there's no immediate danger that our profligacy will exhaust nature's bounty. But, the world's actual oil deposits (not "reserves" as measured by producers) are finite, and we're still using them up, so, like, duh, one day we will indeed start to see the bottom of the well and so in that sense we are "running out". Besides its uses as an energy source, oil is an important feedstock to numerous production processes (plastics, chemicals). As an energy source, it's hard to imagine replacing it for many transportation uses, especially aircraft. But we could easily use a lot less of it to meet our ground transportation needs, so our current love affair with gas-guzzling behemoths seems foolhardy to me. And let's not even talk about the use of valuable fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas, for fixed-point purposes such as generating electricity. If we're wise, we'll use the time that our improved recovery technology has bought us to buy yet more time and to manage a transition to a more sustainable way to run our civilization. IMO that's whatever we can get from renewables and then nukes for the balance. Fortunately, at least in transportation, the pendulum seems to be swinging back towards sanity. Rather than look forward to another 100 years of oil production at current levels, and deal with whatever the environmental consequences may be, I'd rather see us find ways to stretch that same oil out for 500 years. Since this is a political thread, I'll point out that Bubba Clinton did nothing about this issue for 8 years, and I expect the same from Kerry if he's elected, so the bleating I hear from the left on Bush's policies rings pretty hollow. As far as I can tell the left like to trot this out as a campaign issue and then shove it back in a drawer after they get elected. I especially love to hear about how our dependence on oil is somehow a conspiracy of evil oil companies, Dick Cheney, or whoever. As if consumers had no choice but to buy a 12-mpg 4WD vehicle to run to market in. If they want to find the source of our energy woes, they need look no farther than the bathroom mirror. P.S. A good source of information on reserves is BP's "World Energy Report", which can be downloaded from their web site. Since bottoming in the 70s, the reserve-to-production ratio for oil rose to 40+ years and stayed in that range for decades, meaning, since demand increased during that time, that we've been expanding our reserves through new discoveries or new recovery technologies at a better rate that we've been burning them up. Watch out, though, as demand in the world's most populous countries ramps up along with their economies in the 21rst century.