I think Tom Toles' cartoon today pretty much sums up the argument why we should think twice about "pulverize mountains of rocks to get barrels of oil."

Check it: http://news.yahoo.com/comics/uclickcomics/20080409/cx_tt_uc/tt20080409

Another day, and yet another blogger completely misunderstands what peak oil is. Perhaps someone needs to send around a clear and concise memo that explains the concept.

1 - Peak oil just means that global production of oil reaches its peak. Since it's a non-renewable resource with a limited supply this will happen at some time in the future. There is no question of that. We can argue about when it will happen, or if we're already there, but the smart money makes plans for dealing with it in advance, rather than waiting for it to become a serious problem.

2 - No one has said that we're going to stop producing oil. Just that it's going to be increasingly expensive, and as a result slower to bring more production online. The result being that new supply can't be produced fast enough to make up for the old wells that run dry. Result - higher prices needed to justify extracting more difficult oil, and a tighter supply.

You mean keeping slaves, only wealthy natives hold office, women don't get to go out in public, maintain a strong military to hold out the Goths, Huns and Franks?

You know, the more you think of it, the more the conservatives DO sound like they want to go back to Greek and Roman times!

Venezuelan and Russian oil are both extremely high in sulfur making even the crude piping and transport end expensive and breakdown prone. In fact the $ amount quoted on stock pages each and every day is ONLY for the purest lightest easiest to recover crude oil a-la Saudi Arabia or Iraq. Most other oil is quoted at much lower prices.

We in the US get ~11% of our total crude from mid eastern OPEC states. Were we to reduce reliance, not need but reliance on that portion by 1%/year or about 200,000 barrels a day we could safely not worry about those states geopolitical levers nor would we be vulnerable to their ability to shift prices in just a few years.

And by the way, large offshore deposits from Brazil threaten to upset the power and influence of Herr Hugo Chavez in a few years. In fact the Brazilians are so serious about it they are buying 2 nuclear submarines from France to protect their interests. And this is a country that uses almost no crude oil for indigenous consumption. It will be interesting to see the petrodictators have to live in a world where hatred of their biggest customer, the US, doesn't really buy them much.

So at the low end, there's only 1 billion barrels of oil to be recovered and at a huge cost. Yeah, that'll save us.

Brazil burns down several hundred square miles of rainforest ever day to make room for ethanol producing crops. Ouch.

That's a really big word, boys and girls at Classical Values. Oil Shale is an Energy Sink. That means that it costs more energy to get the oil out of shale that you get from burning it. That's a bad thing, boys and girls.

Here's another big word: Obfuscation I know you boys and girls at Classical Values know what that word means. You're doing it now.

I watched the new slide show that Al Gore gave at the TED conference yesterday. He briefly discussed shale oil by making the analogy in the headline. He's right. Classical Values comes across as a junkie cheerleader with their, "Capitalism beats the fear mongers. Again."

One has to wonder where this simple smugness comes from. It's not as if the problem is solved, that capitalism is the answer for this or any other resource issue. Our current financial crisis proves that. (Morgan Stanley, meet the Fed. The Fed, meet Morgan Stanley. Oh, and this was Bear Stearns.)

I don't think anybody believes that oil is limitless. How can one be smug when tomorrow isn't guaranteed to anybody?

Shale oil is only recoverable now because oil went above $50 a barrel. The longterm feasibility of shale oil recovery is price dependent. If the price of oil declines over the long term, there's the possibility that shale oil would become unprofitable. If instead, as we all expect, prices continue to climb as demand rises, then we would have the equivalent of what happens every time they widen the roads. Not less traffic, more traffic.

According to the principles of capitalism, shale oil wouldn't reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, as it would be available to the highest bidder. What good does more oil do us if more oil is being used everyday? At best, shale oil is a band-aid. It's not a solution.

And what about global warming? Watch Gore's presentation. It's not a joke and it's not just happening in a movie. The effects are happening now.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/243

The bottom line is this: Earth has it's hydrocarbons stored largely below ground. Venus has the majority of its hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. There, the greenhouse gases raise the surface temperature by 400 degrees to over 740 degrees Kelvin. That's hot enough to melt lead.

Extracting, refining, and using oil takes our underground hydrocarbons and puts them in the atmosphere. We've been doing that for a long time and it's time to try Plan B unless we want to perfect our planetary impersonation of Venus.

What is Plan B? Al Gore has a plan. Replace the employment tax with a carbon use tax. There's a financial incentive to reduce your carbon footprint.

At first blush, I'm attracted to that idea. It proposes a solution to a big problem. It's an idea that gets the US focused on forward thinking innovation and our responsibility to our environment. It doesn't do it on the back of corporations but rather creates wide new markets ripe for exploitation. It's business for a better world, not just to institutionalize corporate profits with the current energy providers.

And there's something else, Al's idea doesn't generate smugness. It generates excitement and loads of solution oriented energy. Extracting shale oil turns the land into a gaping wound with runoff that looks like black tar-filled tears. It does so at the expense of the local ecology, wildlife, and citizens who have to live with the toxicity, either locally or downstream.

That's depressing.

I for one hope for positive solutions to solve our energy crisis. Shale oil ain't it.