Sustainability and The Oil Economy
Night before last I was reading through the comments on Slashdot on the Report about the Bakken Formation, and how it’s now economically feasible to extract oil from it and opening up drilling there would increase the US oil reserve tenfold. One comment on that post has stuck in my mind, because it’s so true, so utterly horrifying, and so indicative of what is wrong in the world.
This was the general flow of the conversation:
Itchyeyes said (in answer to, “How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world’s oil reserves.”:Fewer than would be produced generating the same amount of energy with coal, which currently provides about 70% of our energy in the US. Even if we all decide today that we’re going to swear off fossil fuels, the process of converting our society to the alternatives will take decades, decades in which we will still rely on millions of barrels of oil every day.
Joce640k said:Even if it’s there, does nobody ever question the wisdom of continuing the oil economy? . . . The environmental impact is pretty clear these days. . . . Save that deposit for making plastics or something, burning it would be a really stupid thing to do.
Itchyeyes countered:A lot of people question the wisdom of continuing the oil economy, there just aren’t a lot of clear cut answers. There are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of people are working hard to make those possibilities a reality, but at the moment nothing is really ready to take oil’s (and for that matter coal’s) place in our energy production on a large enough scale.
and then Xarin scared the BeJesus outta me by saying:The real issue is that US dollars are no longer backed by gold but by oil. Oil is priced, bought and sold with dollars. This is how the dollar gets its value and one reason other governments must hold dollars as a reserve currency. It also allows the US government to print a lot of dollars without any ill effects as they are taken out of the US economy and held/spent abroad. They then are repatriated by being spent on US Treasury bonds which pays for the dollars being printed backwards. The US is like the ticket booth at a fair. It prints and sell the tickets while the rest of the world spends it on the rides. To eliminate oil is to effectively eliminate the dollar and to eliminate the dollar and replace it with another currency such as the euro is to effectively eliminate US sovereignty as its economic policies will no longer be solely its own. It may also lead the US to abandon its debt obligations to the peril of banks, Social Security, pensions etc. One should not cut off one of the branches that the world economy is sitting on without seriously considering the implications.
I’ve had a clue that this is how things work, but did some reading over the last day and confirmed that Xarin basically has it in a nutshell, much to my dismay.
Now, if Wall Street, and The Fed, and Congress, and The Top Dogs, and all the Corporate types know this, then every time anything about Energy (Iraq War, anyone?) comes up in Congress or any of the Agencies (FTC or DOI, anyone?) you can bet they’re not going to vote in the direction of Alternative Energy any more than they have to (it’s called lip service.) It’ll just CONTINUE to be BUSINESS AS USUAL until we are, as a country, and possibly as a planet, bankrupt monetarily, bankrupt morally, bankrupt ethically, bankrupt environmentally, and bankrupt genetically.
So — what is the answer? The revolution will have to be a groundswell, a from the bottom up sort of revolution (as all true revolutions are.) What can you do? Lessen your own personal dependence on Oil by lessening your consumption of both Gas and Electricity, for starters. Grow your own food, or buy locally grown food (less energy and fuel used to get it to you. Better for you too!) and fight the backwards state level legislation sponsored by companies like Monsanto who are trying to make it impossible for us to buy our food this way. Add a solar shed to the south wall of your home. Consider building a Wind Generator, if your local zoning and state power grid laws allow (and check for state and federal alternative energy incentives and grant money for these! There isn’t as much as there should be, but there is some, so let’s USE IT!)
There are lots more things we can do. It’s all about choices, and we have to start voting with our wallets and start putting companies out of business that aren’t with the program, and start voting politicians out of office who don’t represent the will and the welfare of the people. And we all need to get our news from alternative sources. Big Media is not covering the real story, since Big Media depends on the Oil Economy for its own well being.
