4 Comments

1. 

   acilius

    /  December 9, 2008

   Wow, that’s incredible! Thanks for the post.

2. 

   cymast

    /  December 9, 2008

   What’s really incredible is we’re still burning oil. I don’t think anything other than a pervasive global catastrophe will change that.

3. 

   cymast

    /  December 9, 2008

   You’re welcome . .

   I’m a bit surprised I was able to find this video again- it first aired over a year ago. I guess once something makes the “official news” it’s a lot harder to scrub.

4. 

   acilius

    /  December 9, 2008

   It is really nuts that the world still burns oil. When I saw the title of this post I thought about oil waste that causes cancer. And of course there’s global warming, and brownfields wherever there was a filling station, and the militarism and authoritarian politics that seem to take hold of every country where petroleum is produced.

   It seems clear that humans are burning oil faster than the earth is making it, so sooner or later we’ll run out of oil. Probably we’ll run out of cheap oil before we run out of oil altogether. There may still be oil way down at the bottom of old wells or locked up in shales, but the point will come when it doesn’t make economic sense to extract it. We’re in an oil glut right now, there might be a few more gluts coming in the next couple of decades, but the day will likely come when the oil age ends. And that may be quite an abrupt development. It may be less a matter of oil supplies gradually petering out than of the industrialized world hitting a brick wall and shattering into millions of pieces that can’t be put back together to make anything usable.