I had a guy from Florida tell me that the oil wells just fill up again after you empty them, so the whole oil shortage is a scam.
I mean, they do, for a while anyway… but it’s like that last little bit of a milkshake that you never quite get through a straw. There’s no new oil - it’s just the stuff that is just now making it into the well. He thought you just waited a handful of years and you’d have another gusher.
It strikes me that, sort of ironically, “infinite” is only a difficult concept to grasp if you’re smart enough to understand it.
Stupid people just sort of take it for granted. “Finite” is the thing they can’t seem to wrap their heads around.
Even weirder: why are infinite and finite pronounced so differently?
Coz english
“A handful of years” makes sense, I guess, depending on your reference.
How does one hold a year exactly?
Like all units of time I aspire to hold it in a bottle.
They drink your milkshake.
The problem is not oil shortage, because there is no oil shortage. The shale boom gave the US plenty of oil and gas to pump up. And there is plenty of coal too. Enough to last us for at least several decades. The problem is that, in doing so, we would destroy our climate.
There is a shortage of cheap oil.
Time was you could find it bubbling up on the surface. Then you had to dig for it. Then you had to frack. Then oil was expensive enough to justify going back to the old oilfields and pumping water down some of them to push it into the others.
Sure, there’s oil there, but it’s harder and harder to get. That’s why protected areas that still have easy oil are a target for the oil companies.
Ok yes, the EROI is going down.
But the point is that it doesn’t matter if there is oil shortage or not. Even if there would be oil shortage, it is not (and should not be) the main reason why we’re moving away from oil.
Economic reasons are the best reasons. They’re the reasons that work.
I don’t think it matters why we move away from oil, as long as we do.
They are the path of least resistant yes. But that path often leads to collective losses, or if the stakes are high, like in climate change, to collective destruction. We get stuck in the Nash equilibrium of a prisoners dilemma.
That’s true. Without economic pressure it’s a lot harder to get governments to cooperate, though. If economics favor you it’s easier to get the right laws passed.
True
