Tuesday, September 23, 2008

$500 Per Barrel Oil?

Interesting article on Matt Simmons, the god of the peak oil crowd.

Spasms in the market over the summer has to have given anyone pause, even if you think the U.S. can drill a lot more of its own oil.

I've never understood why the argument over alternative fuels has been either/or. There's simply nothing on earth that compares with the energy we can get from oil, so the talk of completely replacing it seems bogus to me (at least for the foreseeable future). Why is there so little talk of both drilling and researching other technology?

The arguments that we are 10 years away from production if we start drilling now aren't true, while it will take that long or longer for alternatives.

So, what to do till then? From the Fortune article on Matt Simmons:

Hint: Learn to garden, and buy some comfortable walking shoes.

Personally, I'd love to do both, except there aren't any real grocery stores within a five-mile radius of my house. There's a billboard advertising a new Target store is supposed to be built about 1/2-mile from the Ponderosa, but I have to wonder if the downturn in the economy has put those plans on hold. Hey, I wouldn't mind walking 1/2 mile to the store. I used to do it when we lived in the Crackerbox.

My problem with the whole "get a pair of comfortable walking shoes" is this:



I can't walk from Fort Worth to Dallas every day.