Shortcuts

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Crude Awakening...

“Oil is our God. I don’t care if someone says they worship Jesus, Buddha, Allah, whoever – they actually worship petroleum.”
Mathew David Savinar, Lawyer and Founder of Lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

Was watching the news last night and now companies are expanding into digging oil from oil sand. It used to be an expensive process at about $40-50 per barrel but now, it is seen as dirt cheap. Yet, to get to these crude oil, they are destroying acres of pristine green forests at the amazon basin unremorsely and at a rate quicker than you can blink. The interviewer was asking one staff from the Shell complany (i think it is shell), if the new exploration was destroying nature last few spots of forest and the guy was saying that the company is always playing its part in "rehabilitation". Yet when the reporter asked if it wasnt shameful that in the past 20 years, while we have destroyed thousand over arces of forest, we have only rehabiliated 1 square km. The guy unbashfully said "No he doesnt think it is shameful." I was mortified. I was even sadder when the helicopter flew over the scene to see tractors bulldozing through and leaving what use to be a huge greenland, to now become a sand dune scene full of vehicles.

At our greed and unrelenting need for oil, we are destroying the delicate balance of this earth as fast that there probably wont be any natural forest left. Estimates of the extent and rate of loss vary, but it appears that nearly half of the world's tropical forests already have been lost, and the remainder will all but disappear in the next two to three decades. The loss is incalculable. While the crude oil company "joyfully" shared that these oil from the sand oil could last us for another 100 years or so (i cannot remeber the exact figure they said on TV but it was suppose to be very long and in huge quanity), I shook my head and told my husband sadly "So what? The earth probably wont LAST that long anyway for us to enjoy all those crude oil."

Other reads
1. Oil Developers Permitted to Penetrate Pristine Upper Amazon

No comments:

Post a Comment