There has been and will be a lot of ink spilled (literal and virtual) regarding the meaning of the Deepwater Horizon disaster; especially what it says about our dependence on oil. But if you want to really understand it — and what it means for us — you can probably do no better than the following 100 words by, Paolo Bacigalupi, who just won the Nebula award for best Science Fiction novel:
An oil company doesn’t just wake up one day and say “Gee, I think I’d like to drill for oil 5000 feet below the ocean’s surface! That sounds like fun!” They do it because they’ve run out of easy oil. They’re throwing every bit of technological know-how into projects that are just at the edge of human ingenuity and technology to get out the energy and keep the party rolling. And they don’t stop drilling at 5000 feet, that’s where they start. Sometimes, they go as deep as 35,000 feet.
That’s amazing technology. It’s also called going after the scraps.
And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell isn’t it?
This profile of his new young-adult novel, Ship Breakers also includes a nice Environment 101 analogy that also hits the nail right on the head with regards to the problem of energy consumption, carbon emission reductions and why it is so hard to get global agreement on such things.
