I bet few people have connected the dots on climate change and petroleum. Climate change is real and will devastate most of the world’s civilizations and cultures. Except for a few vocal Americans financed by fossil fuel associations, the rest of humanity knows we are causing or exacerbating the change.

The other dot is humanity has used almost a trillion barrels of oil. That is a thousand billion. Add up all the proven oil reserves, all the potential reserves, and all the maybe there numbers and an optimistic assessment is less than 850 Billion barrels of recoverable oil. Projecting when we will use the last drop is a crystal ball date. Reducing consumption by laws, cost and moral reasons make any projection worthless. But sometime in the early part of the next century is the most common date.

The line connecting the dots is that we can stretch out the world’s reserves by combating climate change. Cutting back on burning gasoline, diesel, and similar by-products reduces CO2.

The basis for today’s civilization is petroleum. We burn it to get somewhere. The car, boat and plane are made of it. Our homes and offices are filled with it. We wear it. Until a better substance comes along humanity needs every drop of petroleum for as long as we can stretch it. If humanity is still here in a century, I bet they will wonder why we wasted so much of it.

7/31/2015