On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:15:28 -0500, you wrote: >Zell, Chris wrote: > >>Note the quote advocating "universal nimbyism" and doing everything >>to increase industry costs. > >Explain how it would reduce industry costs to build unnecessary >refineries when the total volume of oil can only decrease rapidly in >the coming decades. > >Chris, you need a reality check. Even some of the top oil industry >executives now admit that oil supplies have peaked.
--- Not that I disagree with you, but what would stop those "top oil industry executives" from fabricating that admission in order to exact ever rising prices for "what's left"? >From "The Ballad of Pancho and Lefty": "Out of kindness, I suppose." --- >If you are living >on Easter Island and you have one tree left standing, why would you >bother to build a new sawmill? How will that reduce the cost of lumber? --- Nice. I've used the Easter Island predicament of its inhabitants not being able to leave the island because of their squandering of its resources for fuel, instead of for building boats, to illustrate that a parallel exists between their predicament and ours, which is that if we can't work out a way to get off of this planet before it's too late, the human race is doomed. --- >Your suggestion is similar to the notion that we should combat Third >World starvation by building a thousand more large fishing boats -- >factory scale ships. The problem is, fish populations have crashed in >every ocean and there are no more fish to catch, and if we build more >fishing boats we will simply hasten the day when the remaining stocks >of edible fish are driven to extinction. --- I think that's a little severe. There are truly _no_ more fish to catch? If that's true, then there will never be another bite and all the tilapia will be farm raised. Not quite extinction, but not quite wild. --- >That gives me an idea. While we are building more refineries, let us >also hunt down the remaining blue whales and right whales, and use >the oil from them too. > >- Jed --- OK, and then let's all hunt down the fireflies and tie them down to road signs. ;) Oh, but wait... there'll be no need to with all the oil gone. -- John Fields
