Oil: The Ball Bearing of Industry

Nothing moves without it and without it nothing will move. 

All the solar and wind power in the world isn't going heat your house or keep your air conditioner going all day, all week, all month or all year.  Oil is still the biggest bang for the buck and the world is awash in oil. It's cleaner to store, is transportable and if we need more, it's just right under foot.

Petroleum products are in everything. They grease the gears in wind turbines, they are what electric cars ride on in the form of roads and rubber tires, coat the wires that carry the current, insulate the power supplies and make up the hoses that the coolant passes through from the engine to the radiator. Oil is what makes everything go and to deny this fact is to merely delude yourself. While it's good to save money and to become more efficient, to waste resources on less efficient means of energy production and passing the higher costs onto the consumer weakens the nation and hurts those less able to afford to pay.

This is why rather than sink all this government money into subsidizing alternate forms of energy, taxpayer money I might add, the nation could just as well have put that money into making engines that run on gasoline and diesel more efficient. Since what was the point of alternative energy? It was supposed to help us burn less oil and have less emissions. So if there was an engine, say, that could run 100 miles on a gallon of gasoline instead of it's current 34 miles per gallon, would that not do the same thing? By making oil more efficient would we not require less of it? 

But that doesn't fit into the current blind hate narrative. We HATE oil even though it's in everything and along with it's immature cousin, Coal, is actually what makes the world go around. We would rather have more costly and less reliable wind and solar power and store that power in expensive and massive acid-based batteries for when the wind either doesn't blow or blows too much or when the sun doesn't come out for days. We just want to get rid of fossil fuels!

But it's not going to happen no matter how good this pipe dream makes you feel. It's not making the world any cleaner, safer or more secure. 

Feel good about your electric car? Where does that electricity come from? Hint: Not from a wind turbine! With the more electricity an electric car needs, some guy in a power plant up the road is only going to throw another shovel full of coal into the furnace that runs the turbines. What did you think, that electricity came from an electric-powered power plant?

We've wasted a great opportunity to put the resources into oil efficiency. With all the dough we've already wasted with so little to show for it, we could have funded an oil based Manhattan Project. Who knows what that could have achieved?  But because of politics, this did not/will not happen. Making oil more efficient doesn't even come up in environmental conversation. 

But Oil isn't really the target in all of this nonsense now is it? 

It is industry and the Capitalist mentality that drives industry that is the real target. The environmental movement, Socialist in nature, hopes to control the means of production by regulating what type of power that drives it. The political wing of environmentalism wishes to tell you what power to use, what kind of car you can drive and what kind of power you'll use to drive your business. 

If a manufacturer came out tomorrow and said they could make a production gasoline engine that could get 200 miles per gallon of gasoline, how would you think the environmental movement would react? or perhaps a generator that could power your house all day on just a gallon of diesel? 

Would the environmentalists embrace such dramatic monumental discoveries? 

I'll put my money on an emphatic "no" since it would set back the environmental "movement" if you want to call it that, back a half century.  I think they would attempt to suppress it and claim that it was a concerted effort by Capitalists to discredit their work to "Save the Planet" and that they should still be allowed to continue to explore alternate energies and keep their government funding. Oil and gasoline will still continue to be evil. 

We have yet to wring nearly as much energy out of an oil molecule as lies within it. It would be money better spent to get more out of the most reliable source of energy that we have. 

But that would make sense.