Re: synth vs. the environment (Audi content only insofar as it relates to Audi oil changes!)

[Richard Beels <beels@technologist.com>]

OK, can't take it anymore....

>You would probably find the negative publicity about the USA over the
>last few days (July was the hottest month _EVER_ globally) hard to
>believe.  The USA is the world's largest producer of greehouse gases,
>and the most intransigent about their control.

Global warming has to be the most over-hyped environmental disaster that
isn't happening.  Ever.  Oh, I forgot the ozone "hole".  Of course, the
bloody ozone layer thins over Antarctica in the winter.  It's dark and
there's no UV to make ozone.  Any dumb git knows that.  Remember, it was
just last year that we were cursing the cold (and I can remember the Ice
Age front page newspaper stories from 20 years ago).  The temperature
cycles and 'heatsink-ability' of our dear Mother Earth are a bit larger
than we can affect; or even comprehend.  If you listen to the Chicken
Little's, we've already put enough CFCs into the atmosphere to kill the
ozone twice over.  It's too late, nothing we can do now can stop the
millions of tons of Cl and Fl that are floating their way up in the
atmosphere, on there way to the final battle in the stratosphere.  But then
ozone is a greenhouse gas so maybe it's a good thing we're killing it off?


>Remember, we have less and less oil in reserves every day.  

Gee, I though that proven reserves were actually rising.  It's a silly way
we track oil reserves anyway; proven by the fact that we've been 20-30
years from running out of oil for the past, oh, 20-30 years.    Better
exploration/drilling/recovery techniques have made all manner of 'marginal'
oil fields into 'productive' fields in the recent past.  

Besides, wasn't Julian Simon right?  The Ultimate Resource, first published
in 1980 and was re-published in 1996 as TUR II, is an excellent book that
anyone who wants to debate the natural resources issues should read.  To
quote an excerpt:  "The statistical history of energy supplies, is a rise
in plenty rather than in scarcity... Through the centuries, the prices of
energy—coal, oil, and electricity—have been decreasing rather than
increasing, relative to the cost of labor and even relative to the price of
consumer goods, just as with all other natural resources... there is
nothing meaningfully 'finite' about our world that inevitably will cause
energy, or even oil in particular, to grow more scarce and costly."

The entire book is on the web (along with many other of his writings):
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/BMGT/.Faculty/JSimon/ and one of
the few article in Wired that I actually enjoyed is at
http://www.wired.com/wired/5.02/features/ffsimon.html.


Now, back to our regularly scheduled rants.....


Cheers,
	Richard
	88 90Q - <insert pithy witticism here>
	88 Golf GTi - PRO Rally