Oil Fools

Oil Fools

In 1910 in Southern California the Lakeview Gusher poured thousands of barrels of oil onto the ground. It was the largest gusher in history. It was hailed as a technology breakthrough, perhaps foretelling the century long fatal attraction human beings have labored under with this remarkable yet destructive resource.

Because the drillers did not know how to cap gushers at the time, it went on for a year and a half. About 1/2 of the oil was actually recovered. The rest seeped into the ground,

The impact to California was remarkable, the price of gasoline and oil related products fell sharply. Of course, the amount of gasoline and other products in 1910 was vastly less than today.

For the next 100 years we have drilled, spilled, and tied our entire economy and culture to this "Black Gold".

The Lakeview Gusher should have been a warning as well as a boon.

One half of the oil was lost, soaked into the ground, turned into a black mist that floated around in the atmosphere for years.

But the worst thing was it gave us the impression that crude oil was unlimited. After all, something that could gush like that for 18 months must be limitless, right?

Wrong; what actually happened was a rare deposit was accidentally hit by the drill, and drained the reservoir completely. Other wells were drilled in the immediate area, with dry results.

Oil drilling is a risky business. For every gusher there are hundreds of dry wells. Oil is NOT a limitless resource and is fairly rare in the earth's overall resource scheme of things.

In 100 years mankind has used up about 1/2 or more of the earth's crude oil resources. And that was at a rate that for nearly fifty years was way less than the rate of use today.

Why? From 1910 to 1960 only the "developed nations" used vast amounts of oil. Oil fueled two destructive World Wars, helped kill millions of people, and after World War II helped rebuild and fuel the post-war economy that saw the largest economic boom in human history.

Now, scarcely 100 years after the Lakeview Gusher, we are hitting the wall of supply and demand.

We have tied our economic survival to oil, and are running out of it. The United States, where gushers were first found, has nine years of oil reserves left. THAT IS NINE (9) YEARS!!! Saudi Arabia, the ocean of oil capital, has about fifty years left!

Our entire transportation system is set on the automobile. We have closed our railroads to passenger travel (especially in the west), bankrupted our bus systems, and junked our electric trains (Los Angeles 1930s).

Yesterday I googled a bus ride to Monterey from Redding. One way cost $75.00, and took 18 hours. When I was in college during the 1960s, I would take the bus to San Francisco in five hours with a cost of about $15.00! And, I could go virtually any time during the day. Now, there are two buses a day. The train is worse, Amtrak still lumbers up and down the rails, but in Redding you catch the train (there is only one every 24 hours in either direction ) at 3:00 A.M. There is absolutely no timeliness to the trains either; they can be hours late. And, the trip to San Francisco (about 220 miles) can take 15 to 20 hours! You can drive it in four!

So, we have no choice. We have to drive.

Commuters in California average over forty miles one way to work (we have spread our cities out due to our love of cars).

Most are driving in cars that get less than 20 miles to the gallon, especially in slow rush hour traffic (10 miles an hour with countless stop and go's).

Do the math: 80 miles a day times 5 days is 400 miles a week. At about 10 miles a gallon this means 40 gallons a week at $4.50 a gallon is $180.00 a week times 52 weeks a year is $9360. Add to this the cost of the car, insurance;etc., and our addiction to the automobile is costing us 1/3 of our income a year (or more since the middle class wages have plummeted). Fun huh?

The United States burns billions of gallons of oil a day. We use 35% of the worlds petroleum every year. We do this because: one, we want to, we are addicted to our cars. Two, we have no choice. There are, the more west to go, literally no alternatives. Public transportation, thanks to American's infatuation with the automobile and the oil companies lobbying to destroy train and bus travel, is virtually nonexistent in most western states communities.

And we are fast running out of oil . We simply will not face reality that the faster we use it, the sooner all of it is gone.

Conservatives scream that we need to just drill more, the oil is there; we are allowing environmentalists to stop us from getting it. Really?

If that is true, then why are we having to resort to drilling hundreds of miles out into the ocean seeking another Lakeview Gusher. And, if we get lucky enough to find it, there is a large chance we will spill it (see BP spill, Gulf of Mexico).

The bottom line is that in 100 years human beings have used over 1/2 of the oil reserves up! And, with China, Brazil, India; etc; developing large middle classes, the world will use up what oil in left much faster than we did in the previous hundred years.

So, what do we do? Native Americans, when faced with the destruction of the buffalo herds on which they staked their survival did what all human civilizations do when resources decline, they declined. They starved. A few adapted, but basically their culture was obliterated.

And that will be our fate as well unless we wake up fast. Conservation should become the watchword of every American. We should demand that government get involved in public transportation in a big way, by putting taxes on gasoline and literally forcing us to conserve; investing that money in rebuilding rail and bus transportation. We need to force shipping back to the rails. This will be devastating to the trucking industry, but it is the most wasteful of all transportation modalities today.

You can move a ton of freight for about 75% less in energy use on a train compared to the thousands of trucks lumbering up and down our freeways.

And free enterprise cannot do this. Free enterprise is what got us into this mess in the first place. Free enterprise is the middle name of the oil industry, taking risks, failing most of the time, but then hitting a gusher and getting rich. This risky, destructive behavior has addicted the world to a resource that is fast disappearing, with no plan B!

We need to divert our money for freeways to rail renovation. We need to investigate bus trains, that still use our freeways, but have several "cars" that so hundreds can be pulled up and down the road by one engine!

Electric cars and hybrids need to be pushed and rewarded by government tax credits for those who purchase them.

In short, we need an ENERGY POLICY for the United States. We need to DEMAND this be done!

An energy policy has been stopped by endless lobbying by big oil, who has also adopted the Republican Party as their surrogate, blocking every effort to conserve oil in practically every way. As voters we need to stop rewarding this behavior. Nothing gets a politicians attention faster than voter approval dropping.

An old, but telling example, was the assault on the 55 miles speed limit that was adopted to deal with the OPEC Oil crisis of the 1970 and 80s. Conservatives (backed by the oil lobby) were successful in overturning the lower speed limit, resulting in billions of oil over consumed. That is oil we can NEVER get back. Mpg standards were set on the 55 miles per hour standard and people drive 75. They purchase cars that advertise 28 miles per gallon on the highway IF you drive 55. Everyone drives 75 and gets far less mpg and huge cost.

And who benefits from this? The oil companies of course. And what do they do with the excess profits (that even our oilman President George W. Bush was shocked by), they pour them into schemes to addict Americans even more hopelessly to their dwindling product!

Every wonder why would a business intentionally devise schemes to sell their product faster, which hastens their running out of it sooner? It is the same as running your lemonade stand when you were a kid, and selling all your lemonade in a day, buying candy with the profits, but not having any left to sell tomorrow. No candy!

We are selling our children and especially our grandchildren's future out every day we allow this madness to continue. Every day we worry about gas prices going up, but throw up our hands and say we are powerless to do anything about it, we guarantee economic disaster in our future. Every day we listen to the B.S. of limitless supplies of oil reserves in sand deposits in Utah, or unlimited oil in the Arctic, we hasten the beginning of the end of modern society,

Once the oil is gone, it will be gone. Your car won't run anymore. Planes will not fly. Trains won't run at all, much less on time. Truckers will not truck. The Ipad I am typing this on will never get out of China, where Apple now makes it, costing Americans jobs.

We will be broke, hungry and will encounter the same fate Native Americans on the Plains had when the buffalo ran out. We will die!