Do you care that we may quickly be running out of oil?
In this week's Economist magazine is a very peculiar advertisement. It's an expensive 2-page spread that simply displays a letter from Chevron's CEO, David O'Reilly.
I'm typically cynical about the sincerity of multinational companies, most especially those involved with oil, but yet I haven't been able to figure out the angle/purpose/reason for this ad other than great concern. Might it be that this oil company executive is waving a red flag to governments and citizens everywhere, saying, "Uhhh folks, we don't have much cheaply available oil left but yet you're doing absolutely nothing about this certainty."
It's hard to imagine a world in just 25 - 40 years where oil and automobile companies no longer have any significance in the world economy. If so, this would be just the very start of the repercussions of our civilization without cheaply available energy. I wonder how many people are remotely ready for such a reality? Are YOU?
2 comments:
There is an interesting conversation going on out there on sites like http://peakoil.com/ that look at this issue. You can get pretty scared reading some of these sites but it's really hard to know how likely these scenarios are. Their projections might be accurate but who knows what disruptive technologies will completely invalidate them. This is no reason to use energy inefficiently or to not work on conservation efforts but I think that some of the doomsday scenarios are just self-serving fear mongering.
Geoff,
I agree with you wholeheartedly. On the Disruptive Technology front I adamantly believe that there must be another viable, practical, safe source of energy than fossil fuels. But only when oil becomes too expensive will we really start trying to find it.
Robert
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