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couple of things to throw in to the discussion pot here which no one has raised:
1/ the colossal destruction/retreat of glaciers and ice etc was observed before the industrial revolution
2/ oil reserves globally are increasing, and the decried russian theory of continual oil creation is increasingly borne out (eg by the indonesian earthquake)
3/ bush's bid to reduce oil dependency is driven by desire to reduce dependency, not on oil, but on the middle-east. amusingly, his tactics will have exactly the opposite effect.
4/ oil-driven pollution is more about quality of oil and quality of technology, than it is about oil versus gas versus coal versus nukular.
1. i have some journal excerpts somewhere of a captain re-surveying the north canadian coast in the 1700s. he notes repeatedly that the old maps showed glaciers and permanent ice far far greater than he found. in one case, he was startled to sail into an entire bay which all his previous maps showed was ice-locked with ice pushing a long way out to sea, and that the glaciers that pushed out onto the ice had now retreated into the mountains.
this is essentially before the industrial revolution can have had any serious global effect. or to put it another way: before humans can have had a material impact on global temperature-creating processes.
for an example closer to home for many barbeloids: no one has skated on the thames in london for several hundred years.
i am not convinced that "global meltdown" is primarily, or even directly, driven by oil/gas/coal use. just because you're ON the rollercoaster, does not necessarily mean you're driving it.*
2. many oil wells fill up again if left alone for a while. a phrase coined quite a while back by a rather bewildered researcher who'd gone over the global situation was "we are not running out of oil: we are running INTO oil"
the russians published a series of (repeatable) experiments quite a while back (60s, iirc) which showed that oil was spontaneously created if you compressed and super-heated pure water, then suddenly reduced the pressure and temperature while passing the water over marble (which is a geologically near-elemental rock and extremely common around volcanic regions). such an event would occur naturally if deep water suddenly had its roof cracked and vented suddenly towards the cooler surface. they trialled some exploration on the implications and struck huge oil in regions that according to standard theory could have no oil.
note after the huge indonesian earthquake that tidalwaved big chunks of asia the christmas before last, huge tracts of indonesian beach were flooded with oil.
concerns re "running out of oil" i personally believe to be over-stated.
3. bush's announcement was geopolitically driven rather than ecologically driven. given the increasingly violent expression of anti-american sentiment in the middle-east, and the huge economic dependency of america on the middle-east in terms of fuel to drive industry and utilities (the major fuel users, regardless of what anti-car campaigners like to claim), there is an obvious reduction of risk to the american economy by reducing reliance on oil from the middle-east. america currently buys 17% of its oil from the middle-east. it wants to reduce that to ~4%.
unfortunately, in the absence of politically-unadvisable quotas, his remaining tactics are essentially limited to reducing the profits available to oil producers. who's the lowest-cost producer of oil in the world, and thus the last group standing when all the other groups have been squeezed out of being able to profitably supply oil to america? why, that would be the middle east.
the "bush" government's risk-reducing scheme will actually exacerbate the geopolitical risks they seek to reduce.
4. out of time, i'm afraid (footnote below cutpasted out of above, earlier). i'll just quickly point out that the vast majority of oil-related pollution comes from small and addressable subsets of oil-users. and there is a lot more variability possible than most people are aware of. e.g., stand behind a bus in california as it drives away. no billowing rank cloud -- it smells SWEET. as in: healthy. as in: you deliberately breathe in deeper, amazed.
* having said that, there are specific hotspots in oil-related environment abuse i still want addressed, and addressed HARD. minimal impact. e.g.: requirement for high-temperature incinerators, requirement for jet exhaust to be near-neutral at normal cruising altitudes, requirement for (mostly UK) sulphur to be removed from oil. just on the latter, note that it is the UK's incredibly high sulphur oil/petrol that is responsible for the incredible rates of rust you get in cars in this country. NOT the salt everyone points the finger at. for an easy example of this, buy a new vehicle in summer, scrape the brake disks' coating off by driving it home, then park it and leave it for a couple of weeks. it has seen no salt, and no rain. note the brake disks are covered in rust, as though you'd left them for a year by the seaside in subtropical oz. |
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