My fascination with oil continues...

[Alex]

Oil. We can't live without it. It appears to be a non-renewable resource. The world uses more of it every year than the year before, and no one seems to care if they waste it or not.

Why? What if we discover that the oil we pump out of the ground is actually lubricating the continental plates as they slide against each other?

What if it turns out that the oil we pump out of the ground is creating additional friction below ground until eventually we have a super mega earthquake?

What if we build up our roads and highways to such a massive extent that nothing can replace oil and allow our way of life to continue, as a result, we turn into a Mad Max society?

Now that is something to worry about. [img]confused.gif[/img]

Did you find yourself tuning out over my lament until the very last sentence. Until I made it about us?

We are a truly pathetic species, are we not?

[soulfilms]

we <h1>can</h1> live without oil. we haven't tried because oil is present and whilst we know it is finite, there is enough of it presently to more than satisfy our needs. if we had never 'discovered' oil, we would have harnessed windpower, solarpower, hydricpower and utilised them. but oil is cheaper and why bother developing other technologies when there is a cheap alternative?

a chemistry teacher once said that fossil fuel will never run out because the less of it there is, the more it will cost and the laws of economics will govern that oils will rise so much that it would be more efficient to develop new technologies. i find this an interesting theory that in the current capitalist domination, has more than a smidgen of likelihood.

[Alex]

We will probably discover that Oil, if used sparingly, would have supported wind power, solar, hydropower, etc, for the next several hundreds of years, rather than be sucked down through the tail pipe of 1 billion cars.

Imagine you eat the seeds of a vegatable that could have been planted and brought forth 10,000 times as much food as the seeds you ate, that is how we are consuming oil.