Posted on 03/23/2006 2:41:09 PM PST by saganite
A good old fashioned oil spill could wipe out millions of birds. The untimely demise of millions of flu carrying birds may also spell the end of H5N1, the dreaded Bird Flu.
Therefore, oil may end up saving us rather than sending us down the proverbial old "bird poop chute".
My father worked for Shell oil as a geologist for many years and told me back in the 1960s that there was hundreds of years of oil left and that was before a number of discoveries. He worked in exploration in Alaska, California and Utah.
Indeed we should be! But the doom-sayers never remember, and are never reminded, that their previous predictions proved false.
That's why I say I don't think we're heading to that level of disaster. It took hundreds of years before we could explain why the Norse crops stopped growing and their herds stopped having enough pasture to graze. These days, however, there is money to be made in environmental friendliness. When oil becomes too expensive, it will finally be economical to use alternate energy on a large scale. If they have the phrase "10000 years" in their summary, though, it doesn't sound like they deal exclusively with industrialized societies.
Without having read the book, I make the following prediction: its thesis applies whenever we can identify a problem and we have the technological means to solve it. It's when one of those two statements are false that we get problems like the ones I mentioned. It sounds like an interesting book and I'll give it a read.
Did you mean I should track down the authors or the Incas? ;)
To "prove" oil reserves is itself a fairly costly operation.
How will expensive oil make anything else economical?
Economical relative to oil, that is.
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