Gotta love Richard Heinberg's latest - suggestions for Oil Exec quotes on peak oil:
"We believe fears about Peak Oil to be . . .
a. unsupported by evidence.
b. utter rubbish emanating from cretinous doomsday cultists.
c. compellingly credible.
d. strangely arousing.
"People have been forecasting the end of oil . . .
a. for decades.
b. since the age of the dinosaurs--no, since the Big Bang.
c. with ever-greater urgency--especially since 2005, the year of maximum world crude oil production so far.
d. just to tick me off.
"Such predictions have always failed before because . . .
a. we've continued to find more oil, and we've found ways to get increasing amounts out of existing oilfields.
b. planet Earth is like a Hostess Twinkie, except the sweet creamy center is actually nothing but pure West Texas crude.
c. the early ones were premature and relied upon incomplete data.
d. we humans just plain deserve to have inexhaustible resources to satisfy our ever-burgeoning appetites.
"We now have technology capable of . . .
a. exploiting resources that are buried deeper, and that are trapped in less porous rocks, and that are of poorer quality, than ever before.
b. drilling from Houston all the way to Baghdad and back.
c. almost making up for rapidly declining production of affordable, high-quality oil from the old, giant, on-shore oilfields we've been relying on for decades.
d. confusing, entertaining, and distracting consumers so effectively that they completely ignore the obvious fact that their lives are entirely dependent on an utterly unsustainable system of non-renewable resource extraction.
Goes brilliantly with this Onion Story:
Though no one knows exactly how much of the dangerous bullshit is currently gushing from BP headquarters, estimates put the number at somewhere between 25,000 and 70,000 words a day.
"We're looking at a truly staggering load of shit here," said Rebecca Palmer, an environmental scientist at the University of Georgia, who claimed that only BP has the ability to stem the flow of bullshit and plug it at its source. "And this is just the beginning--we're only seeing the surface-level bullshit. It could be years before we sift through it all and figure out just how deep this bullshit goes."
Congressional hearings aimed at stopping the bullshit have thus far failed to do so, with officials from BP and its contractors Halliburton and Transocean only adding to the powerful torrents of bullshit by blaming one another for the accident.
Along with the region's wildlife and fragile ecosystem, countless livelihoods have been jeopardized by BP's unchecked flow of corporate shit. Those who depend on fishing or tourism for their income are already feeling the noxious effects of the bullshit firsthand, as out-of-control platitudes begin to reach land and seep ashore.
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"We believe fears about Peak Oil to be strangely arousing" = made of 24Karat Win.
and the Onion is always spot on with their articles.
Faaaa-bulous!
Sharon, thanks for keeping up up do date on this.
The real bullshit is the fact that, in the Big Business/Big Government corporate state, Big business is the senior partner and calls the shots, totally dominating our elected wimps.
Just connect the dots. Universal health care - stopped dead. Bailouts for banks - results in bonuses as usual for the top bankster dogs and Wall St. reform? - stopped dead.
And now the Gulf oil disaster with the regulatory agency personnel tasked to oversee offshore drilling having coke-and-sex parties with oil industry people, and the US government too timid to put BP's US operations in receivership and demanding that they compensate every person whose life is destroyed before, and if necessary instead of, paying dividends, even if it bankrupts the damn company.
BP is just a single example of just how sick our way of life has become, a way of life where people at the highest levels of business and government have no integrity, no honor and no allegiance to the common good. That such people are allowed to run this planet, killing raping and pillaging the globe unimpeded, says a lot about us as a people.
President Obama and the US Congress have blatantly shown us that they are nothing more than servants of the corporate plutocracy that could care less about the lives of the average person. BP should go on trial for criminal negligence. Period.
One woman's protest:
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/06/09-1