If the profits are obscene, is this considered porn?

It seems that we have added another three letter word to the list of "four letter words" that we are not supposed to say in public if we want to be generally accepted as civilized. That word is OIL. I apologize if you have young children viewing this blog that may have just read that word aloud. Lets take a moment and think about how and why this word has gone from one of the greatest discoveries known to men and a blessing from God to basically being blamed for the inevitable destruction of the planet and all of her humanity.

Obviously the single largest use for oil in the world today is to produce fuel. We'll come back another day to all of the reasons why oil is superior to any other resource we currently have for use as fuel. In the left column you will find a list of just a few other products that are made from petroleum, a.k.a. oil. Petroleum literally means "rock-oil" and it is used to make thousands of products that we use every day. I have listed some of them below. Now before you jump on the bandwagon and join the NO OIL, environmentalist crowd who is literally putting a strangle hold on our ability to produce more oil, consider this. No one including "Big Oil" is saying that we should not develop any alternative energy sources. In fact if you do a little investigating you will find that in many cases the majority of the money going into the research and development of these solar, wind, hydrogen and other renewable energy is coming from the Big Oil companies.

Even if it were somehow possible to switch to 100% renewable energy today and turn off the faucet of oil for fuel in America. What do you think is going to happen to the cost of these products listed below? You may be saying "well we'll just reduce it to 90% or 75% renewable energy for fuel". I have bad news for you, that is not how economies of scale work. The reason you can by diapers for 27 cents each is because there is already a massive worldwide consumption pipeline for petroleum because we use so much of it for fuel. The minute you remove that factor, the cost of all of these products will go through the roof or companies will just quit making them altogether. It is really simple, you cannot build one of these massive oil rigs, tow it out into the ocean, drill nearly five miles into the ocean floor, pump up the oil (assuming you find it), ship into the port and refine it into useable petroleum all because dad needs another roll of electrical tape. The numbers just don't work. Even though we all love many of these products we don't consume enough of them collectively to justify the enormous undertaking of getting the petroleum needed to make them.