What stunned me the most is the amount of oil it takes to produce our food. To bring a single steer to market takes 75 barrels of oil. One farmer with about 1000 acres in soybeans uses 45,000 gallons of diesel per annum ! On and on these figures went and this is only linked to food production. We live in an “oil based” continuum and evidently shall perish by it too. Everything in our vision field has some link to oil and the need for freshwater too. As a side note our US Navy is the largest consumer of oil on an annual basis which is mind boggling when we think of all the cars and trucks driving our highways too.

Planet earth is soon to have 7 billion souls running about with over 50 percent living in squalid third world conditions, all hopeful to eventually have what we enjoy at present. China (pop. 1.5 billion) and India (pop. 1.2 billion) are coming on like gangbusters with their citizens hoping to emulate the American dream; ie., relative to uber consumerism. It simply isn’t going to happen without major conflicts breaking out for control of the remaining oil supplies and now even access to freshwater is looming in the decades to come.

We’re past peak oil and seemingly past peak, easy fresh water supplies too. It takes a phenomenal amount of freshwater to produce our modern goods and utilization for services. So we can explore and drill all we want, but we’re still doomed it seems.

I’ll supply the Netlingo.com world population counter along with interesting stats concerning our planet and it’s citizens or should I say denizens.

http://www.netlingo.com/more/poptick.html

After fetching the site, click on the “go here” link in the lower right hand corner so the worldwide statistics are available on a real time basis.

Also folks might care to read the theories of Thomas Malthus an 18th century political economist that predicted our grim fate based on a burgeoning world population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe

My apologies for sounding so glum about out future as a species, but as it’s said figures don’t lie, but liars (pols) figure.

Carl Nemo **==

My eyeballs get smoky even thinking about it.

The best laid plans of mice and men, need I say more ?

If we drill the reserves now, we’ll use it for what, powering SUV’s? People see the US reserves in different ways, but I see it as a very small portion of the overall world amount. I don’t think it will do much to prolong our availability of oil, reduce costs, or make many communities wealthy.

What I do see it doing is encouraging the status quo which is to burn it up as fast as possible, then worry about where to get more when the wells run dry.

I say hang onto it. Save it for a time when we truly need it to power our war machine and the vital things that will always need oil to function, because those things will always be here.

When conflict arises, as I’m sure it will, we will be competing with the rest of the globe to get and hold Middle Eastern oil and being on the far side of the globe from it makes that task almost, if not completely impossible. Thus, we need to hang onto our own strategic reserves.

I even think it’s counter productive for the rest of the US, but who am I to go against what they want for their own states. If they want it, go for it.

I don’t quite understand your second paragraph. You suggest we need to maintain our strategic oil reserves but think that drilling our own is counter-productive?

“I have no problem with it just so long as it’s not off of the Calif shore,”

NIMBY?