Why I Love Oil

[NickB79]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/solitairetownsend/2023/02/02/why-i-love-oil/?sh=1af5a6845903

Today, Shell announced its largest ever profit in its 115-year history – from setting alight one of the most precious materials on earth.

The generations that follow ours will struggle to understand us. Not just because we allowed the scourge of climate change to creep across our planet. But because we caused that immensely destructive threat by burning a limited resource.

The irony is too painful: destroying the irreplaceable by burning the invaluable.

And don’t even get me started on moulding it into a plastic fork, used only once, yet outliving anyone reading this, and their great grand-children. Of course plastics are near indestructible in nature, all those bottles, bits and micro-beads are made from millions of years of heat, pressure and power. It’s like using the Mona Lisa for toilet paper.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. This is fairly close to how I think of the stuff ... I don't LOVE it but I respect it

We are, (statistically damn near) all of us, alive today, and talking here on the internet, and living (most of us) in relative comfort ... because of the bounty these processes provided us.

I can simultaneously decry Climate Change (and I do) and the evilness of Big Oil ... while admitting that oil and natural gas and coal gave us damn near everything we take for granted today, like being alive, and not living in 18th century squalor.

I could even argue that 'world peace' and 'democracy' and even 'liberal values', paradoxically perhaps ... exist in their present form exactly because this ancient fossil fuel energy bounty and its exploitation ... have allowed for people to become more generous in spirit.

Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas ... represent LIFE, for humans. Esp. when there's 8B of us.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Sustainable wood is underrated

and they haven't begun to clean up trash to steam technology. Someday we'll be digging the landfills for raw materials.

[Shermann]

4. I suspect we're a long, long way from being able to mine landfills cost-effectively

Our current recycling programs can't deal with a hose being tossed into a recycling bin.

[bucolic_frolic]

5. Those things you mention worry me

All the hoses in the world. And mining ... but someone has to start somewhere. Like plucking metals from landfills.

Somewhere on Youtube there was a video of a guy seeking to recycle porcelain bathroom fixtures. Imagine how many of those. He put them through grinders. The powder is good as new. But no takers.

And think of all the leaded glass in the world. You can't grind it because grinding makes lead powder. Can't reuse it. It's just there, wherever it sits.

[OldBaldy1701E]

8. As I recall, there is an Asian fellow who has invented the means

to make a very useable plastic substitute from soybeans. But again, no one wants to follow up with him or even maybe help further the research to make something that can replace the plastics and such that oil makes. I do know that we could implement a program to convert all vehicles to alcohol and we can make that ourselves without drilling up the planet. However, with the stranglehold that Big Oil has on the various world governments, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

[JudyM]

6. Thanks for posting this.

I wasn’t aware of her company… they do good work, ranging from marketing sustainability initiatives to selling insect-based cat food.

[BWdem4life]

7. It was a beautiful article, but

I can't bare the way it ended.