OB...dude...Sir...posts like that are why I love you, man. You know how we always say we pretty much think alike but come at things from different angles?
Theory test:
I'm with the Drill Baby Drill crowd but not for the reasons anyone might think. If you ask me one of the best damn things we can do for ourselves and this planet is to use it all up. ASAP. Get rid of every last drop of that nasty shit. After it's gone we'll stop spilling it, stop polluting the air with it and stop fucking fighting over it.
We need desperately to get off our oil addiction and get serious about alternative energy sources but we're too fucking stupid and too fucking lazy. We'll keep on with the same old bullshit until it's gone because that's the easiest thing to do. We're more than a little stupid that way.
It'll be gone someday and thank gods I don't believe in that it'll take a few hundred million years for more to be formed. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "So long and thanks for killing all the fish".
Good riddance.
But oil isn't the problem...we are. Just like guns don't kill anything on their own and pencils don't misspell words on their own. They're all inanimate objects that require our intervention, our misuse, our neglect, our greed and our stupidity to make them dangerous. Someday in the future people will look back at our time in history and be dumbfounded that we actually relied upon such a disgustingly foul source of energy.
It will be a very brief period in history...we started using oil in earnest what, about the late 1800s with the invention of the internal combustion engine? Peak oil is predicted to hit inside the next 50 years or so and with the way China and India are motoring up it ain't gonna fucking last too much longer than that. In my lifetime we'll be sucking out every last drop like a fat kid with a straw at the bottom of a Big Gulp from 7/11. So we'll have had about 200, maybe 250 tops, years of insatiable oil orgy? Meh...drop in the bucket over the course of even human history, which itself is nothing in the life of the planet. The real question is whether or not we'll be able to withstand the withdrawals.
It promises to be nasty. We get pissed off when gas costs 4 bucks a gallon. How pissed off do you think we'll be when it costs 100 or more? When the government is hoarding it all for the military? When only the super-fucking-rich can afford to fill 'er up? You want to talk about a revolution over health care or immigration or national ID cards...you can't even IMAGINE the turmoil that will come when the oil wells run dry and we haven't made arrangements to make it irrelevant.
Since we ain't smart enough to do that then I say it's a lot like going to the dentist. Have a seat, get a grip on the arms of the chair and say "drill away, Doc...let's fucking get it over with."
spongebobcrackwhore
