Excellent point! People forget that "oil" as an energy source has only been around for about 150 years. (I am not talking whale blubber). A mere blink in the eye of the world.

Demand for oil will never go away, even if we find some way to eliminate gasoline as a vehicle fuel. Petroleum products are used in so many things that we take for granted and expect to have readily available. Furthermore, too-rapid a transition from gasoline to whatever alternative turns out to be the most economical and abundant will have its own set of problems - least of all the cost of decommissioning refineries & port facilities. Market-driven changes occur much more smoothly than politically-driven changes, with less disruption & displacement. Change will be disruptive either way, but less so with market-driven (voluntary) changes.

This is a lie put up by big oil. we can get rid or oil all together and the products that is made from oil we can use plastic instead.

Yes, I laughed at that one too. The staunch environmentalist that made that comment I just repeated truly had no idea that plastic is an oil byproduct. When I asked if he ever passed 9th grade science he wanted to know why I was belittling him. You be the judge.



Dr. what a great point! Thanks. We can get rid of that finite oil we pump out of the ground and replace it with whale oil! It is renewable! It is cleaner burning! It is better for the environment! We can use sail boats to hunt the whales saving the world from the pollution of nasty big oil with diesel powered boats. We can have whale farms and grow our own whales and dispatch them humanely. How many whales does it take to gas up?

Grossly unfunny. There have been suggestions that whales be "herded" for food, too.

Oil is here to stay; we just wish ironically and illogically there was less of it.

I'll make a bet with you. We meet back here in 200 years, and I bet you will eat those words! We will have moved on, probably out of necessity of price.

Is it a date?

Sooner or later, we will have to find other sources of power, but oil isn't going anywhere anytime soon. We have over a trillion barrels, completely untapped, here in the US alone.

Drilling would bring down the price at the pump; as we saw a week or so ago, when Bush simply implied that he may, well, kinda sorta, y'know, maybe, wellllll.....maybe he'll rescind the order against offshore drilling. That's all he had to do, and prices dropped. Imagine if he actually did it.
Imagine if Darth Pelosi and her minions of evil, illogic and idiocy actually gave in and let us drill on a mere 2,000 acres of the 20 million-acre ANWR, or here in the Continental States, or offshore, or......what we need to do is vote in people who's hands won't be so firmly and deeply in the pockets of the Environmental lobby. That might not be so farfetched a thought as it seems; their 9% rating actually gives them little hope for November. And literally turning out the lights and leaving, rather than vote on a drilling measure, didn't much help their chances.
Castro's guests, the Chinese, are sucking oil out of the Gulf as fast as they can get it.
How much do you think they care about the environment?
No, we need to be drilling here, there and everywhere, and building new refineries to process it. Estimates are that gas could even drop back to a buck and a half a gallon. I don't know if I believe that or not, but I'd sure like to give it a try.

Don't you mean YOU wish?   

Oil used to seep from the ground ruining property values and the economy, then some person learned to put it to good use.

I don't have your faith so I'll probably have to stand you up, but I agree: oil will be a rare oddity in 200 years--such as nostalgic keroesene lamps and classic autos.  

Many wish geologists never went to Saudi Arabia.

And how would that stop the oil from flooding the ground water in America?

hey! The Beer's on me!