by Heineken » Mon 24 Oct 2005, 14:17:28
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('falser', 'I') was thinking what is a better analogy for the current oil situation. The best I could come up with is the California Gold Rush. In the beginning, gold could be mopped up from rivers and streams with little work. The gold itself was cheap because it could be found easily with cheap labor, but the prices of everything else starting to skyrocket - food, clothing, tools etc. Once all the easy to find gold was mined, big companies came in with sophisticated systems. They diverted rivers in order to strip mine the riverbeds. They water blasted rocks away. They had to completely wreak havoc on the ecosystems in order to find more gold. The independent laborers eventually didn't make enough money from the gold they found. It just become too expensive for so little profit. I think it's very similar to how easily oil was found back in the 1800's across America - just poke a drill in the ground and you'd have a geyser. But these days we have offshore oil rigs drilling thousands of feet into the seabed and then another thousand horizontally, or we strip mine a hundred thousand acres of Alberta and cook tar out of sand in order to produce oil.
I don't know. Without elaborating overmuch, in some ways I like the gold analogy better than the apple one, and in some ways I like it less.
The main problem with the apple analogy is that apples are a living, renewable resource and oil isn't. That sets up a whole chain of difficulties that to me ultimately KO's the apple analogy. Gold, like oil, at least is relatively inert.
Gold, on the other hand, is and has always been and will always be quite scarce on a global scale. Also, it's not very useful or necessary.
Oil seems like a unique resource with unique constraints and unique applications. Maybe there is no good analogy.