Why not ban oil? At least in public places?
Asked by
josie (
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)
January 17th, 2011
A day does not go by without some reminder that somebody somewhere wants to ban smoking. The list of places where a person can smoke gets smaller everyday. And that is certainly understandable-it smells, it causes disease, it takes up money that other consumer goods and services, plus the government, would like to get their hands on.
Another thing that people want to ban is guns. They require training to use properly, they are routinely used by lunatics and gang members, which makes them at least appear to be dangerous. Plus, a call to ban guns always gets a politician an irresistible chance to get their name in the paper, or on TV.
So why not ban oil? It is difficult to find. It is dirty, dangerous and expensive to harvest, expensive to transport, plus it drives world geopolitics in a direction that guarantees international conflict. (Plus every body hates the “big” oil companies, so why not screw them once and for all?)
Not much good to say about cigarettes, guns… or oil.
Pressure to ban cigarettes and guns is unrelenting.
Why not ban oil while we are at it?
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35 Answers
I presume this is a facetious posting? Perhaps if we developed adequate alternative energy sources, then it might be possible. But until oil becomes too expensive to sustain, that doesn’t seem likely.
That would be great, except, of course, for that pesky problem of having to move people and goods from one place to another.
Why not just Ban everything like in this it will happen eventually anyway
It would be stupid to ban oil. Regulating/restricting its use seems wise, so people would stop consuming it so quickly without thinking about how to conserve it. Think of how many stupid plastic water bottles come into existence from oil, get used for 45 min at a gym, then tossed in a landfill for 50,000 years. That’s just dumb.
The problem with this is that EVERYTHING you own that is made of plastic… be it a bottle, the shell to your tv set, the bumper on your car…. EVERYTHING that is plastic…. requires oil to be made.
In fact a significant chunk of our oil use comes from the manufacture of plastics. I would dare say more than what is refined down into gasoline.
@tedd Totally agree. Instead of banning oil, we should adjust our attitudes towards regarding many plastics as easily disposable. More thinking.
That seems a little crude ;¬}
The amount of plastic products produced in the US has doubled in the last 20 years, and only 10% of all recyclable plastic waste is recycled. What is the business climate that has allowed for this to be practical in the face of escalating oil costs? That’s what needs to be shut down. Quit making so much plastics.
I agree. Drilling for or refining oil should not be done in public and only in the privacy of your own home! The nerve of some people!
What a wonderful idea. It just goes to show that our politicians are not thinking things through. If we just make anything harmful, (or fattening, or we just don’t like) illegal we could straighten out this place.
When we were cutting down trees at an alarming rate (deforestation) and using things like paper bags to excess, we found another solution, plastic bags. But of course we now have the plastic problem and we still cutting down trees at an alarming rate. OK, bad example. Maybe we shouldn’t think this through, let’s just do it and see what happens.
I don’t think sliding from one extreme to the other is wise, but I get your answer is tongue-in-cheek, @Jaxk . It’s not like we need to thoughtlessly consume the resources at an unsustainable rate, or therefore not consume them at all.
From other posts, I think you said you run a business. Obviously you’ve dealt with supply-chain issues. Do you blow through your production inventory as rapidly as possible, knowing your supplier is going to have problems if you do, or do you reassess the supply-chain? You certainly don’t close your doors without solving the problem.
Your paper bag analogy is good though. Should we consume paper faster than we can replenish it? Not really wise. So if we can’t replenish it as fast, do we switch to something (oil) we can’t replenish?
Why shouldn’t we take stock of the situation and reevaluate? It’s not like we need to be parked or going Mach 2 with no speeds in between. This isn’t all or none.
We all need to own this problem and adjust our consumption accordingly.
We won’t need to ban it. At some point alternative sources of energy will become cheaper than oil. At that point, oil will ban itself.
If only there were an alternative!
My fuel of choice is £1.32 a litre here this afternoon! Daylight robbery!
@wundayatta Totally agree that is how it will happen, but I think that will be a more painful transition than a smooth one.
That would mean nearly everyone would have to walk around naked and barefoot. Most synthetic materials used in clothing and shoes are oil based products.
Many common fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and drugs are also oil based.
It would currently be impractical at best.
Maybe someday, God willing, we WILL be able to ban oil and oil-related products, but we have built almost an entire society around things that use fossil fuel: cars, power generating plants, airplanes, etc. Until we can develop energy alternatives to coal and oil, we’re kinda stuck.
A real dilly of a pickle, wouldn’t you say?
@cockswain I think the transition will be much smoother than you do. Certainly it would be hard to be worse than the kind of dislocations the oil crises have put us through.
Our energy generators will become more and more decentralized as more windmills and solar panels and geothermal heating and efficiency improvement efforts come online. This will happen more or less smoothly as oil becomes more scarce. Bio-fuels will also help. Nuclear too. We have many, many options for energy production. This is unlikely to be a crisis.
@cockswain
First we need to agree on the problem. Frankly I don’t see the urgency. We have the largest oil reserve in the world in the Green River Basin. Somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 trillion barrels. Enough to last us 200–500 years at our current consumption. So what’s the urgency?
We went several thousand years using horses (and mules and oxen) for transportation. For the past 1 hundred we’ve used oil. For the past 40 years we’ve started looking at alternatives. 40 years is not a long time and we are making tremendous strides. We just haven’t got a viable alternative in hand as yet. So I say again, what’s the rush?
@wundayatta
Unfortunately, almost everything you mention (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) doesn’t impact our oil usage. We only use about 1% of our oil for electric generation. Most is transportation (about 70%) and industrial (about 30%).
Now coal on the other hand, we use a lot (about 50% of our electricity comes from coal). But then again we have lots of coal.
@Jaxk I was oblivious to the existence of that reserve. My understanding was that we’ve recently passed peak oil production (or will soon), and then production will not keep up with demand, so costs will rise. This, coupled with the rapid industrialization of India and China, will put tremendous pressure on global energy demands. But again I haven’t heard of this Green Basin reserve at all, and I’d like to discuss how that fits in to peak oil.
I am a believer that carbon emissions contribute to global warming, so I have other concerns regarding oil. For now, I’m content to limit this discussion to peak oil and the transition to alternative energies.
@cockswain
Unfortunately the shortage is a government imposed shortage. Hell, I haven’t even gotten to the Anwr reserves or off shore. The government has merely put all our oil reserves off limits. So with the existing oil supplies, yes they are diminishing. The oil shale is much like the oil sands of Canada except they are richer (more energy content). Unless the government opens this for development, the oil companies will not be able to refine the processes for extraction. Current estimates are that oil shale would be profitable at about $35/barrel. I think we’re well past that and we’re not going back.
The global warming issue is as you infer, is a different conversation. I can’t help but wonder if we should be pouring billions into better fuel efficiency or alternatives like natural gas (yet another limited fossil fuel) rather than using what we have while searching for a long term sustainable energy source. But everybody hates oil, so let’s just jump to the first hair-brained scheme that comes up.
@Jaxk 1% now. If that’s true. How long ago was it nothing? It will be a hell of a lot more 100 years from now. Think long term. These changes happen glacially, as far as human lifespans are concerned.
@Jaxk did you happen to see the story where the EPA revoked the mine permit of a coal company in West Virginia? Not only does the EPA have authority, granted through Obama, to do this, the permit was with Arch Coal. If you know the background of the battles with Arch, the recent mine diaster, the unions, and environmental groups, it makes it even more tangled.
http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201101131453
How many years and how much money has Americans poured into alternative energies like wind turbines, solar and other alternatives? How far have we gotten?
@wundayatta
My understanding is that oil for electricity has been on the decline since 1973. I wanted to post a link for this but can’t find one quickly. Natural gas has been the up and coming option of choice. It’s fairly clean and and cheap. We haven’t been building Nuclear since the 80s and coal is becoming too expensive. Not because the coal is expensive but because the regulation is.
So, I guess the answer to your question would be, it was zero before electricity. And is likely to continue to decline. 100 years from now it will be zero again, it’s just not the best choice anymore. Wind however will never be the replacement. Forgive me if I rant for a minute about wind.
Wind power is not possible in high density areas. It must be transported long distances, typically from the southwest. Transmission loss for electricity can be as high as 50% depending on the distance it travels. Also the electric grid would need major reconfigurations to handle this and with the transmission loss, there’s just no way to make it on any large scale. Not to mention that it consumes vast amounts of land. Just not realistic.
Solar on the other hand can be generated locally (you can put it on your roof). No transmission loss. Of course it works well in the southwest, not so much in the northeast. But at least it has a place in the future. Wind doesn’t.
@bkcunningham
No I hadn’t seen that but it was inevitable. Coal is as hated as oil. It doesn’t take much to find a reason to kill it (can I still say that).
Honestly I don’t think we’ve put all that much time into finding an alternative. It’s only been since the 70s that we were even interested. Hell, I still hold high hopes for Nuclear fusion.
Actually I think it would be pretty neat if we find a cheap way to capture antimatter produced in thunderstorms for energy purposes.
I have an idea: lets ban murder or theft, or drunk driving.
I think we should treat crude oil as a finite valuable resource like copper and gold and titanium. Too good to be turned into carbon dioxide and water on a massive scale.
@cockswain
There is a lot of information out there. I used to have a folder where I kept all the links but my disc crashed last year and I lost them all. The biggest problem they have is in the water demands. the retorting consumes a lot of water. I’ll post this link as the guy seems to know what he’s talking about and Exxon-Mobile as well as a few others say they get 3–1 energy out vs energy in.
Here is another one that says “it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production.” There are a few issues not the least of which is that government owns most of the richest land. Without any glimmer that the government may allow it to be used, it is difficult for the oil industry to invest much more money than they already have.
The other point you need to know is that the oil sands in Canada went through a similar process. It was not profitable and the naysayers said it could never be done competitively. Now oil sands production account for half of Canada’s oil exports. The Shell ‘In Situ’ process is the one that sounds most interesting. They claim cost in the $20/barrel range and it uses less water. And the oil shale we have is richer than the oil sands in Canada.
If your interested, I can dig around and find some good stuff. This was just a quick pass.
@cockswain
This is one of the articles I was looking for. Sometimes these things are easy to find and sometimes not. Anyway, it give reasonable overview tar sand vs oil shale and talks about the quality of each.
Thanks for taking the time. I’ll review it when I get a chance.
so tough to find the truth about things…
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