SamM_UK

I know, I was just riffing on the nonsensical nature of the thread. If we want to be accurate on the frog thing atrizine either makes the males sterile or about 10% turn female, something many species of fish and reptiles can do even without pollutants present. Of course the bigger question is what the hell is this chemical run off doing to people and what is being done to prevent it being dumped into the water table?

With Pruitt driving the EPA away from acting based on science I'm gonna guess not a damned thing.

samnavy

iTrader: (7)

Buddy of mine is a land-man in West Texas... was a squadron-mate until he got out and went to work for a couple oil companies. Was chatting the other day and I started talking about how solar was going to put him out of business... he said "shiiiiiiiiiiit."

My argument was that as we make another generational leap in battery technology (in the next 5yrs or so) and li-ion is replaced by something twice as dense at half the cost, and solar panels get cheaper and more efficient by the day, that there is a revolution coming in electricity... that it's kinda already here. And when we can plug our electric cars into our houses and charge them for free off our solar thats essentially free because the startup cost is going to have such a short payoff, every house in (20-30yrs) will have a full solar roof and battery pack big enough that you'll never need the grid... not just new-build houses, but ALL HOUSES. He didn't want to talk about that.

And then I asked him how much oil was left in the ground. I remember being told back in the 80's when I was in elementary school that if we didn't change our ways, that we'd run out of oil by the time our kids were our age... my kids are 9 and 10, so we should be out of oil by now because we're certainly not consuming any less than in the 80's.

And then I learned something fantastic... he asked me "How much do you think is left?"

I said that there can't be "that much" left since we've been taking it out for so long... maybe 60-70% of what's in the earth has been taken out? That we only have 30-40% left. It certainly can't be any less than 50% for the whole world. And he said...

(I'll paraphrase)...

"The estimates continuously vary because the technology to find and measure oil reserves continues to become more accurate, and the technology to extract oil improves all the time... but the best guess right now is that in the Permian Basin, we've only taken out between 8%-10% of what's there... and in the Middle East, just because it's the geology is so much more predictable, it's around 15%. Trust me, when solar gets cheaper, so will oil... I don't see any reason that 20yrs from now, gas can't be back to $1gallon in order to be competitive. Production will increase as required to make it cheaper to compete with alternative energy for a long time."

**** what you think you know.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

I heard that we continue to find there is more and more oil showing up in places that should have been running out. It has been proposed that the simplistic notion that oil was derivative of dead dinosaurs was foolish improbable nonsense and that the actual source is completely different. It has been a couple of years so I can't remember more.

olderguy

iTrader: (19)

Many, many years ago I remember Rush Limbaugh stating that we would never run out of oil because the earth kept producing it............