I just heard
a report on NPR as I was coming to work that really disturbed me. They were interviewing a guy in Utah who invented a way to get oil from the oil shale in the Rocky Mountains. Now that barrels of oil are so expensive, it is feasible to pursue this technology. This guy started working on it 25 years ago, when, as the interviewer said, "the nation was in the grips of another Iran-related oil crisis." My jaw dropped.
So now the high price of oil is Iran's fault?
Furthermore, it takes 1 ton of oil shale to make 1 barrel of oil. ONE TON. And it costs about $30 to make, which is now economically feasible given the cost of oil. The process works by extracting vaporized oil from pulverized rock.
So now it's ok to pulverize the Rocky Mountains for oil?
This is just wrong on so many levels: blaming Iran for our oil crisis; blasting the rocky mountains to smithereens in the pursuit of oil; and increasing the effects of global warming because of our insistence on burning fossil fuels.
More below...
I can't believe that NPR would blame the high price of oil on Iran. Iran has now become the bogeyman for every fear that we face. They are planning to nuke us, they want all of us to become Muslims or else, and they are making us pay through the nose for oil. Obviously, we need to bomb them immediately.
And then there's the destruction of the Rocky Mountains. I just read a piece in Vanity Fair showing the devastation of the Appalachians in West Virginia due to surface blasting of the mountains to get coal. Is this what we want our country to look like, from sea to shining sea? Endless almost-plains of scarred mountains dotted with blasting equipment?
And then there's global warming. Al Gore has been raising awareness about global warming through his talks and movie, An Inconvenient Truth. The chief cause of global warming is our burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. Contrary to recent ads paid for by oil companies, carbon dioxide is not our friend. Figuring out new ways to burn more oil is not going to help us solve the problem of global warming.
So let's see. Let's bomb Iran so we can control more oil, just like we do in Iraq (!). Let's blast those Rocky Mountains to get even more oil. Let's keep on burning them fuels, baby, like there's no tomorrow. Well, there may be no tomorrow, in which case we don't need those Rocky Mountains anyway.