September 2009

Wrong Numbers, Episode 3,000,000,000

Once again, the media are all bleating the "wonderful" news about oil. BP, apparently, has discovered a large 3,000,000,000 barrel reservoir of oil 35,000 feet down in the Gulf of Mexico.

As per usual, they seem totally unable to join the dots and connect oil consumption with CO₂ emissions, so they've almost all copied BP's gushing (pun intended) press release with no mention of "that which must never be mentioned in connection with oil", and lo, BP's stock market price jumped upwards.

This is getting quite tedious, folks. It is hard to know whether these journalists are complete idiots and gullible fools, pathetic hacks reduced to regurgitating vested-interests' press releases, or intentionally malevolent.

Three billion barrels represents under six weeks' worth of global oil consumption. We'd need to find ten such fields annually just to keep standing still. Needless to say, we don't.

Lou Grinzo puts it all into context in his The Cost of Energy blog.

Jeremy Leggett, who really should know better, wrote an almost-insightful piece in today's Guardian about it. But even he fails to stress that the consumption of this resource is one of the worst things that we could possibly do.

And nobody's asking the obvious questions:

Is consuming the new oil that BP has discovered tantamount to a crime against humanity and the planet?

Is drilling for oil knowing full well (my apologies for another bad pun) that the oil discovered will be burnt spewing CO₂ into the atmosphere, morally reprehensible?

My answer to both questions is a resounding yes, what's yours?

Having a Giraffe

I blame BNO News' @mpoppel for all this. There was I one day in July, quietly minding my own business, when he tweeted this:

Forget the heffalump in the living room, a giraffe in one's back yard is much more appealing!

So I sent my friend Liz a totally perplexing text message reminding her to check her (minuscule) back yard for wayward giraffes when she got home. Needless to say, there were none. Her imaginary piggiflu-infected pet pig which she keeps out there had remained undisturbed, albeit somewhat lonely.

After much banter, I was led to Ola Helland's wonderfully crazy onemilliongiraffes.com. He's aiming to collect one million hand drawn (or hand crafted) giraffes by 2011. Please help him out and get drawing. If I can do it, so can you!

Here's my contribution:

Postscript, August 25, 2010:

Ola did it! Hooray! Well done, Ola!