We have to stop wasting precious oil on frivolities

Anyway you crack it, oil remains the miracle fuel. A barrel of this concentrated sunlight is portable, burns cleanly relative to coal, has a high energy yield and until now has been relatively easy to obtain. This is why oil is the world’s fuel of choice for transportation systems whether they operate by road, rail, sea or air.

Oil is also a non-renewable resource. Since it takes a gazillion years of pressure-cooking organic matter in the bedrock to create a barrel of the stuff, the faster you use it, the faster it will run out.


And we have been burning through it in pursuit of the utterly frivolous at increasingly unsustainable rates for nigh on half a century.

It made strategic sense for the Royal Navy to adopt oil-powered warships which had extended range, power and speed. It doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to hop into the Hummer to find a pack of cigarettes or to drive unfit and overweight kids three blocks to school in an SUV more suitable to a Yukon mining camp.

Vancouver Sun