It’s Time to Just Say No to Oil and Gas

Ah, oil. Black gold. The bewitching shimmering glow of money in every gooey black molecule. Oil in many ways is just as much the stuff of fantasy as gold is. But like gold, although it still has its allure, it’s less and less useful in real life.

Oh it’s been useful for a long time and it is still in some ways frighteningly useful. But not as useful as it was and it comes at a very high cost. It would make more sense in the long run to stop drilling oil and gas wells. This is going to have to happen eventually. But it’s a tough sell in the US.

The United States in post Civil War history has had two great fears. Fear #1: Communism, socialism, and anything that reminds certain people of the existence of communist, socialist or related ideas. Fear #2: Doing anything, anything at all, that would make the oil and gas industry cry its crocodile tears of impoverishment.

Obviously, we’d all do a lot better in terms of preserving the planet we actually live on if we stopped using petroleum products altogether. The thing is, it’s not impossible. The world used to be highly dependent on whale oil. But nobody uses whale oil for anything anymore.

The fact that the world is highly dependent on oil right at this moment means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Things change. And it isn’t like there aren’t other sources of energy. Some of you may have noticed a glowing orb in the sky known as the ‘sun’. It turns out this ‘sun’ is an incredible energy factory. Like a really big energy factory. That produces energy. That humans can use.

It’s the economics of oil, the money goggles, that have the biggest effect on why people still have goo-goo eyes for oil and its products. The oil and gas industry has money goggles so big they obscure the entire planet. Yes, oil and gas enthusiasts will cry copious tears over every well lost and will don sackcloth and ashes and wail.

And yet, there are plenty of people crying all around the world right now, every day, all the time, over their loved ones lost to natural disasters, over their inability to make a living from the land anymore, or because the oil and gas industry pollution has made them terminally ill. People cry all the time.

The oil and gas industry can take its turn at the weeping willow.

We all know that with the election of the latest president of the United States that any talk of preserving anything on planet earth will be subject to vicious mockery, scandalous lies, and a general outpouring of lunatic bullshit.

And yet, presidents of decaying national powers can make all the turn-back-the-clock pronouncements they want and still the clock won’t turn back. Oil will still be on the way out. Even the oil industry knows this.

We can break up with oil’s deceitful heart gracefully and somewhat amicably or we can drag out the drama by wailing ‘don’t leave me, don’t leave me’ until our voices are hoarse. Anybody that doesn’t love undue suffering would be taking actions now to prepare for when oil is gone. But lots of people in the US looooooooooove undue suffering, so the US probably won’t prepare.

But everyone else can if they choose. Everyone else can get pretty fed up with the way things are and start thinking about something better.