Within reason


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Posted by Sherman in Idaho [24.32.202.166] on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 15:28:27 :

In Reply to: An Oil Well is like an ATM posted by Don in Missouri [69.69.205.226] on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 14:32:32 :

Taken to its limit, your reasoning leads to the conclusion that we should leave it in the ground forever. So, to use your ATM analogy, oil left in the ground is like gold left in a vault. It may make you feel rich to have it there, but it isn't doing a bit of good for you or anyone else just sitting there. You can die a rich miser with all your gold sitting in the vault, just as easily as you can die poor having spent more money than you ever had.

Reasonable people do something in between. They save some and they spend some. Likewise with the oil, we shouldn't waste it (and we shouldn't be flaring off all that gas from the Bakken fields), but just leaving it in the ground forever accomplishes nothing either.

Like it or not, modern civilization runs on oil. There are all kinds of things that could theoretically replace oil if everything was different, but in reality, you can't beat oil for low-cost transportation, which is what makes the world work these days.

As for the CO2, it's a one-shot hit to the environment. We've burned up about half the fossil carbon already, and increased CO2 by 50% in so doing. If we go and burn the remaining 50%, we'll have doubled CO2 from pre-industrial levels, and from then on it will slowly decline. It's been that high before without "breaking" the Earth. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's not the end of the world, and best of all from an ecological point of view, it's self-limiting. 1000 years from now, no matter what Congress or the UN does, people will not be burning coal and oil, for the simple reason that there won't be enough left to burn. In another 200 million years, maybe God will make some more, but we can leave that problem to the next Congress.



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