Most Americans have never heard of Total Oil (pronounced ‘toe-TALL’). It is a French company, and their site says it is the 4th largest oil company in the world.
At any rate, Total’s CEO said yesterday that because of the current economic crisis, oil companies have not been drilling, therefore not finding new oil reserves – and the world faces a potentially huge oil shortage crisis within two or three years. He says the oil exists, we just haven’t found it.
I always find these predictions interesting. Oil predictions have long been amusing. Some famous person said once that he would eat his shoes if oil was ever found west of the Mississippi. Well. Oil was indeed found west of the Mississippi during his lifetime, but I’ll bet he didn’t eat any shoes.
Despite all the dire predictions and artificially created shortages & crises, we just keep putting gas in our cars every day. It’s always there, isn’t it?
I can, however, attest to the lack of drilling. My husband is a drilling engineer who sits in his office doing analysis because the oil company he works for isn’t drilling any wells. They keep him (and many other drilling engineers) employed because they expect to again sometime soon. We hope that expectation will keep him employed until they actually do start drilling again.
Will there be a shortage? Is there more oil we haven’t found, enough to keep us going for another 200 years or whatever? No one knows.
In the meantime, I haven’t heard any news about alternative fuels or more efficient vehicles in a while. Not even a single hybrid car commercial. I kind of like oil crises; it keeps the husband employed and it gets people off their rear ends to try to do the right thing for the environment.
Vive La Crise!
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There’s a lot going on in sci/tech about alternatives.
Problems abound, and clear solutions are not yet visible. Dedicated folks are plugging away, but advancing inch by inch rather than in leaps and bounds.
It would be really helpful if the environmental terrorists weren’t so damn hypocritical–can’t use wind power, because birds might get hurt. Can’t use nuclear, because it might cause pollution if it is massively mismanaged. Can’t use solar because it makes our neighborhoods look bad and may increase ambient temperatures in these days of global warming.
Sheezsh–now you have ME on a rant.
The Mother´s last blog ..So Much for Teaching Responsibility
I remember a funny news story from California when we lived there in 2002-2003. Basically someone set up cameras & watched people leaving environmental rallies. Things like cars left running, at idle, for HOURS so the cars wouldn’t get hot. How many of the cars were SUVs. Throwing McDonald’s wrappers out the window as they drove away. Etc. Etc. We have made fun of that for years.