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Goodbye Oil
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Sunday, December 07, 2003
- 09:04 AM
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Writer George Monbiot published an article on his website called The Bottom of the Barrel. ZMag linked the article as Goodbye Oil, and that sums up the topic pretty well. As the world's supply of oil diminishes, the use of oil continues to increase. The article mentions the fact that the oil won't completely disappear, but will just become increasingly more expensive to extract. An article in New Scientist, vol 179 was cited which stated the claim that each year we use four times the amount of oil we find. That is a scary thing to consider.
The article made it clear that the oil reserve was on the way out, and would probably reach its peak in the lifetime of most middle aged people living today. It went on to negatively discuss some of the ideas surrounding alternative fuel sources, such as natural gas, or hydrogen fuel cells. The gas will run out as quickly as oil reserves will if used extensively, and there is starting to be a great amount of fear surrounding leaky hydrogen fuel cells and global warming. Most sources talked about were cited as taking as much if not more energy to implement as is generated. Either that or extensive use would destroy life on earth, like nuclear power and other toxic waste producers. This is an obvious downside.
The article was pretty interesting, but dark and gloomy. The author expressed his faith though that humanity can recover from this decline and that destruction is not inevitable. We would need to redesign our cities and our lifestyles however. He stated that nobody ever took to the streets because they wanted to consume less, but rather because they wanted to consume more. But I think conservation will continue to become a bigger and bigger issue as we near problems of this nature. If we don't, then destruction is inevitable.
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