Wow. Chutzpah. Oil Profits Shatter Records and we’re stuck being gouged at the pumps, and the only solution offered by Republicans is to a) give the oil companies more tax breaks, and b) give them rights over more land to drill (despite the fact that the oil won’t be accessible for at least ten years and they aren’t developing over 80% of the land they already hold rights over). By the way, guys, your policies affect Canadians equally detrimentally.
Whatever. Forget I said anything, and go fill up your gas tank! Remember, every time you do, you make this man smile. You want to see him smile, don’t you? Of course you do!
hmmm…. goverment + oil = no comments from anyone. Except for this one, commenting on the lack of comments.
I noticed. No comments either on the possibility that the US government could be responsible for the anthrax mailings, either. In all fairness I posted the two of them in rapid succession, but still. I think you’re my most regular commenter, and that makes Jason a sad panda. Maybe I should stick to posts about video games and religion.
You’re right, I may be your most regular commenter. Jason Thibeault, the internet’s All Bran since May, 2008.
I do what I can to help keep the internet’s shit moving.
Anyway, you know as well as I do that the internet is a series of tubes as opposed to a dumptruck. We can’t have the internet’s pipes getting clogged.
I just didn’t comment on those two posts because I honestly didn’t know what to say.
Sorry I forgot about the anthrax. No way in hell the government did it. Growing spores leaves a distinct signature from the area they were grown in. It also requires chemicals that will leave their own signature. Sort of like fingerprints and very specific to the area they all came from. In short, no matter where on earth a chemical or biological weapon is produced a government lab like the CDC will be able to state exactly where it came from. (You can thank my ex GF and her degree in biology for that information.) Which is why no chemical weapons were found in Iraq. It would be embarrassing for tests to show they came from Dow Chemicals in the US or France.
As for oil profits I commented on that already before I read this post, sorry.
But with regard to the amount of oil left in the ground if you look hard enough you will discover that Sask is now developing oil fields. What isn’t being told to people is that the oil companies have known about that oil for the last 95 years. There are wells all over Sask that are capped. All we need to do is open them up and start pumping. Most of the wells were drilled during WW2 and the oil extracted at that time was used for the military, When the war ended the wells were capped and have sat that way every since. We didn’t need it so we never pumped it out of the ground. But the oil companies have owned the rights all this time. So yes, they buy the rights and sit on the oil until it makes sense to pump it. We still have far more supply then we have demand. Peak oil is a very long way off yet. But the big companies want you to panic now. After all they know that oil is cheap to get and alternatives are expensive. They know that the oil will run out at some point and they already have the means to swap to other energy sources it’s just the costs are too high right now. So they need to pay for the alternatives somehow and the easiest way is to increase the price of oil. Thankfully we the people are naive enough to do that for them so they don’t really have to do much work at all. All it takes is someone saying something enough times with enough charts and fake data behind them until 25% of the people listen. Once that happens you’re in. Everyone else jumps on the bandwagon and the hysteria takes over all on it’s own. Even highly intelligent people will listen and believe. And once it gets taught in schools, well you have a winner ladies and gentleman, At least until a newer better scare comes along.
How do I know? Well that would be becasue I remember the OPEC embargo of the early 70’s. Shortly after that happened oil was discovered in LARGE amounts in the tar sands in Alberta and development started. Then you had the coming ice age being taught in schools warning all children that the world was cooling off because of CO2 and that oil was to blame for all of it. And yes the schools were teaching that an ice was coming, I remember that clearly and if you search old Time magazine articles you can read all about it. The oil companies were the bad guys and the middle east full of crooks and thieves and the world was going to end up a frozen wasteland if we didn’t all start to conserve energy.
In the 80’s the environmental movement really took off and things were going well until the cost of oil dropped like a stone. Seems the middle east realized that they needed people to buy oil if they wanted to be rich. But all this cheap oil was bad and by the early 90’s oil was at $20 a barrel and no one was thinking about alternative energy anymore. So how do you change peoples thinking? Hey the scare tactic worked once why not do it again. A little more fake data, some new and improved scare tactics, a few thermometers placed in city centers to artificially raise the temp record and now you have “global warming”. Well you can’t very well use the ice age scare again can you? At least not until the data for warming is proven to be “not as accurate as first thought” Then you can go back to the cooling theory and use the term climate change which no one can argue and still you get to blame oil. What a great scheme. I wonder who thought of it? Can you say the UN boys and girls? How else are you going to get the entire world on board to change their very way of life? It can’t be done by just one leader. And you need a bad guy to be the skeptic too so that everyone can point at him and say how bad he is and how he isn’t helping heal the earth. Does Bush look good for that role?
Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Now that is one hell of a conspiracy but how do you prove it? Like all really good conspiracies, you never will. Not as long as the people are worried about other things like did the Bush administration organize 9/11 and is the war in Iraq ever going to stop. A really good conspiracy needs a really good bullshit cover story to mask it. One that the people themselves will encourage.
Well things look under control here on earth. The people are chasing shadows while the corporations go about their daily lives. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
I want to get the planet off of its addiction to oil regardless of whether oil consumption is responsible for global warming, global cooling, or global cupcakes. I don’t know if I subscribe to your conspiracy theory, Bob, but at least the logical endpoint, regardless of peak oil, oil consumption, etc., is that we have to get the hell off oil. Period.
Oil, Solar, Hydro, or Hydrogen there is no difference. They all bring climate consequences with them. Solar requires land and natural resources for the equipment to harness the power of the sun. Hydro requires changing the nature of the landscape to create reservoirs and dams and losing land to do so. And hydrogen gives off water vapor which is the all time number 1 green house gas, but no one wants to talk about that.
The fact is no matter how we get out energy there is a price to pay. So here is a question for you, keeping in mind that absolutely everything you buy requires delivery on a truck and 90% of what you need to survive requires a farm using tractors to grow it, what form of energy would actually work?
Getting off oil is easy to say, but at this particular moment in time there is no alternative to oil that will actually allow everyone on earth to live. That means no matter what you chose, at a minimum 30% of the population will die from starvation or the elements.
The fact remains that right now I as a person living in my own home and with no more resources then what I can find around me, buy within my means, or pick up from the trash thrown away by others, can produce all the oil I need to survive on. Oil is a part of our life and will be for long after you and I are both dead.
Please, I beg you, stop thinking linear and start thinking in the abstract. Synthetic oil was a reality in WW2. The diesel engine ran on peanut oil when it was first designed and built. Oil can be pumped out of the ground or made from plants. The reason that this is so is that all the oil in the ground came from dead plant life. What did you think fossil fuels came from the dying animals? Nope. All the oil in the ground came from the plant life that has died and been buried by time. That’s why the middle east has so much pooled oil and North America has so much shale oil. Mother Nature hasn’t had enough time to compress the fossilized plants into oil in North America yet. But give her time and she will. Or we can find our own way to speed up the process and make the oil directly from plants. Oh wait, someone already has. And algae seems to be the dark horse in that race.
Okay, let me rephrase. We have to get the hell off of Light Sweet Crude. How’s that?
I’d be more than happy with an algae-based diesel fuel given that a) it’s possible to provide the entirety of the planet’s present energy needs with one algae pond the size of the Sahara, and b) if you supplement that with solar and wind the only things burning this diesel are those aforementioned trucks. The price you have to pay (with energy from the sun being absorbed and converted into power) may even help reverse any greenhouse effects and in essence help reverse this present climate change trend. We have to be aware that every solution has a trade-off, yes, but we can’t be so petrified of the trade-offs that we do absolutely nothing and keep going in our status-quo of letting the oil companies run us roughshod and stay at the mercy of rogue nations overseas. Not that I personally agree with the idea of fiddling with the earth’s ecosystem, given the fact that every time we try we royally bone things up in every other aspect of environmentalism, but at least we can look at the alternatives for chrissake.
Incidentally, you forget that we’ve had these discussions before, and I agreed with you on these points. I don’t see why “please, I beg you, stop thinking linear and start thinking in the abstract” is necessary, especially where I would hope you consider me to be a far more critical and capable debater than your average opponent nowadays. Unless of course you were directing your “please stop thinking linear” at the general populace, and not me, in which case, my apologies.
I am begging everyone to stop thinking linear. For the most part you don’t, however I have noticed a tendency in yourself to revert to linear thinking when ever you become passionate about a topic. Which given your background and training is understandable. All people tend to revert to their training when ever they become passionate about things. My training causes me to automatically question things. If a lot of people say something is so then I start to question why they are saying it, especially if those talking the loudest have no background in what ever it is they are saying.
And yes we do have to get off light sweet crude. But currently the alternatives simply don’t do the job. And the real problem isn’t going to be getting off of the crude, the real problem is going to be getting people talking about the solution to the problem. A thought just popped into my head that you might actually enjoy sharing. If you are running a network and one computer gets a virus and becomes corrupt do you just fix that computer and ignore potential damage tot e rest of the network or do you fix the infected computer and then scan the network to ensure it;s working correctly? The current thinking about oil leads me to believe that the majority of the people complaining about our addiction to oil are doing just that. They are demanding we get off oil but have not bothered to look at the network as a whole and see just what the cost of removing oil will be.
Linear thinkers wants us to stop using crude oil but don’t say what we will do after that. The oil companies, those very same people being vilified by everyone are actually looking into ways to get us off oil. They are exploring Algae and Methane and Hydrogen . They are looking into ways to keep the infrastructure that keeps us alive moving. The eco-warriers are looking at away to heat their houses and charge their electric cars but giving no thought to farms and industry. Any solution to the problem needs to fix the whole problem and not just one part of it.
The real answer is a mix of nuclear, hydrogen, synthetic oil, Solar wind and hydro. The nuclear powers industry, hydrogen powers our cars, synthetic oil powers our transportation industries (planes, trains, trucks and boats), and solar, wind and hdro heat and cool our homes. Oh and in places where it will work, geothermal is the best of the bunch. Iceland has already proven that.