When a barrel of oil can be turned into $700 of plastic and chemicals, why are we burning it for $40 to $140? Why are vehicles so aerodynamically inefficient? Why are their no choices but blended international petrol at the gas station pump? Is this capitalism if the burning of oil products does not make economic sense? What about the ecological impacts on earths food farms from the pollution emitted by all the exhaust pipes in the world? What about our economy, we make still have to import 10 million barrels per day to fuel our transportation infrastructure, is that economically sustainable?
Sun Energy
1 square meter of earth or the ocean under full daylight is receiving 1kw of sunlight energy. Plants use this energy to covert water, co2 and minerals in living soil into food for us to eat and for animals to eat so that we can eat the animals too.
Life on earth is solar powered, industry is not. We power most of our infrastructure burning ancient sunlight, carbon based fuels that were once plants and animals. Subjected to the heat and pressure in earths crust, these plants and animals were slowly cooked in the absence of oxygen, creating hydrogen rich carbon molecules. Today we mine this coal and oil and natural gas from earths crust in an unsustainable system of natural resource depletion, pollution generation and ecological food system damage that is ultimately bad for our long term success as a civilization. The entrenched powerful industries that render this burnable carbon from the earth want to keep society linked to using energy dense liquid fossil fuels in transportation.
When a barrel of crude oil can be converted to $700 worth of plastics and petrochemicals, what on earth are we doing burning oil in crude inefficient internal combustion engine applications willing to pay only $40 to $140 for that barrel. The oil industry could make way more money and pressure society into moving beyond burning oil by converting most of the oil to plastics and chemicals.
So, then if it does not make economic sense to burn the increasingly hard to get at oil from earth crust, why are we still doing it? Stupidity and corruption in the oil sector and government and a lack of reasonable choices or alternatives at the consumer level. At the gas pump of today you have only one choice most of the time, petrol, is that a free market ?
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