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Oil demand should still hit a record this year. — © AFP STR
It’s a testimony to the bottomless stupidity of humanity that obsolete fossil fuels are tolerated at all. Money makes idiots of everybody. The fossil fuel saga is proof. If you search phasing out fossil fuels, you get pages and pages of results. It’s not actually happening. Being stupid is still profitable.
That’s a real pity. If Russia didn’t have a lot of oil, the current disgusting global political environment would be very different. If Saudi Arabia didn’t have oil, the entire sad futile history of US policy in the Middle East would never have happened.
The global environment would be extremely different. CO2 and methane have raised global temperatures for millions of years. There’s nothing to argue about, and people have been arguing for two whole generations.
Current fossil fuel emissions have never been higher. Billions of tons of these wastes are contaminating everything. A lowest-end annual figure of about half a million deaths worldwide are said to be directly caused by air pollution.
The main reason for this situation is inevitably politics. Global lobbies have been pandering to extremely rich oil lobbies for at least a century. Wars have been fought in the name of profits. There are no ideologies in this sort of politics.
What’s odd is that neither the politicians nor the oil lobbies have realized the obvious. They could be making a lot more money with modern products. You’d think that even the World’s Least Impressive People and Lowest Human Intellects would have figured that out by now.
Carbon can be used in all industries. Carbon chemistry is a huge field. As anything but fuel, carbon is invaluable. Methane is CH4, including four hydrogen atoms. Hydrogen is the fuel of the future, with a vast bandwidth of other industrial uses. Many sources of oil include sulfates, another valuable commercial resource.
These glaringly obvious issues are from the oil industry. They don’t think about things like that. I pitched an article to an oil company years ago. I suggested “Carbon, the unknown resource” as a sort of primer to these options. The response was, “Oh, we don’t have anything to do with carbon. We just do oil and gas.”
You can’t argue with ignorance because it never has any idea what you’re talking about. That level of ignorance was a bit too much for my ever-so-slightly herniated low levels of patience. It did give me unwanted firsthand insights into the problem, though.
Extrapolate that grim revelation very slightly, and you have an obvious almost total lack of vision for the future of these resources. They do nothing because they know nothing. They could be positioning themselves well for a very profitable future. They don’t even understand it.
Add to this the equally fossilized nature of politics and the Dorito-like intellects therein. New tech of any kind takes them a couple of decades. Deregulation makes them impotent. Money makes them spineless. Bullying makes them cowards.
Most of them have no idea whatsoever what governments are for. It’s like corporate business; nothing to do with outcomes, all about doing deals. The means is the end, as far as they know.
What to do about it?
Force the stupid bastards to make money by repurposing carbon. You may have to spend decades listening to how brilliant and humanist they were, but what’s new?
Sell this basic chemistry to the fools as though it was the smart thing to do. Any idiot will do anything that makes them look “clever”.
Give them dollar-based comparisons between oil and any upgraded product. Some of them can read, despite evidence to the contrary.
Meanwhile, set up as many carbon sinks as you can. This may take a while.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
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