The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

Very funny, these USGS people.

One has to ask: In an environment where so much money is to be made using "reserve growth," why hasn't it happened already?

It would seem that right now would be the easiest point to grow reserves while they are relatively easy to get at, not when they get really hard to extract.

The USGS argument falls flat. There will not be a sudden boom in extraction technology that will allow us to scrub every pore in the pay zone. What they fail to recognize is that it requires energy to push, pull, heat, or freeze. All of the slack in inefficient technologies has been pulled taut over the past forty years. Throwing energy at the problem is self-defeating.

I would guess that the USGS will continue to be the equivalent of the "propaganda bureau for continued corporate happiness" until the truth has been beating the average corporate slave over the head for several years.

By that point, it will be too late to mitigate anything. All of the people who have been urging "caution," to "go-slow," to avoid "looking like a nut" will have won. What will they have won? Well, immense human suffering that could have been avoided. A destroyed, polluted, degraded world. And a society that will undoubtedly be as fragmented and lonely as it ever was.

They will have won for the short-sighted, greedy, me-first corporations the last squeezings from the dying hearts of our people and our environment. Of course, the black-hearted corporatists will head for the hills and attempt to live in their gated, broken glass-topped walled compounds with Blackwater standing watch outside those gates.

Unfortunately for them, the earth will still be a sphere and the effects of their greed will still be felt by them.

Thank Gaia for that.