Scraping the Bottom of the Oil Barrel

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the U.S. has already run through its entire supply of easily exploitable oil. For example, in the 1970s it was rare for an off-shore drilling platform to drill more than a few hundred feet.

Today, it is not uncommon for wells to be drilled to depths of 5,000 feet or more, which has been one of the complicating factors in stopping the enormous and environmentally destructive flow of raw oil from the destroyed British Petroleum facility in the Gulf of Mexico.

People cannot physically operate at this depth. They are solely reliant on machines and complex technology, which are as vulnerable to failure as any human being.

Moves are already well underway to in the U.S. and Canada to extract oil from tar sands and shale oil at what might well be environmental costs that easily dwarf the damage already done to the Gulf of Mexico.

There is also the matter of complicity and collusion between the oil companies and their purported regulators, the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service, which duplicates the destructive relationships between greedy financial institutions and their purported regulators. And we all know how that turned out because we are still reeling from the consequences.

Gail Collins dissects these relationships in one of her typically thoughtful New York Times columns.

If there is a moral here, it is perhaps that we as a nation are stricken by a collective hubris when it comes to our dependence on fossil fuels. The handwriting on the wall was clear to many of us in 1973. Each passing day we are increasingly dependent on the "kindness of strangers" in foreign countries, many of whom wish us nothing but evil. The status quo is doomed. Change is inevitable.