Energy Plot 1 - Oil

I bet you've forgotten about this.
I wrote it last year, and had to dig back to find it. I should continue with those posts.
But they're all so looong. TT^TT
This one will probably be really long too.
And its a pretty controversial one.
Energy.
There's a lot going on about energy right now, with the debate of renewable energies against fossil fuels. So, lets discuss some of this. Because every alternative, whether fossil fuel or renewable, has its pros and cons.
To save myself from writing a ten-page long post, I think I'll break this one up by sections, and then tie everything together once I've finished that. And I'll try not to hit every detail, but stick to the more important stuff. Otherwise this would be incredibly long and boring. hopefully it's not too boring already...
I should probably look up more facts... but my notes are somewhere under the house, and I don't feel like digging them up. I probably will at some point, and come back to add more details. Though some of them might be obsolete by then. Hmm.

Let's start with oil.
Oil comes from decomposed organic material that's many tens of thousands of years old. Even older. And a while ago, it was very easy to come by. Some of it was right at ground level, and you could scoop it up with a bucket. After they used that up, they had to drill down to get at it. But as they extracted all of the easiest pools of oil, they had to go down deeper and deeper, drilling in remote locations like out in the ocean and in the middle of the arctic tundra.
Whenever they set up a new drilling area, it destroys a lot of the surrounding habitat. hence the debate about drilling up in the arctic refuges. A drilling area there would destroy the migration route of thousands of deer.
And there's always the possibility that the extracted oil will leak. This is especially a problem when they drill in oceans. There have been many instances where ships containing oil, or oil platforms have leaked and spilled thousands of gallons of oil into the oceans. This oil sits on the top of the water and washed up on shore. It clings to birds and mammals and anything that lives on or near the ocean. It destroys the water proofing of the animals, and they get hypothermia and die. Not to mention that oil isn't good to get in your mouth, eyes, nose, anything. There's no way to prevent these spills. There will always be human error, or some factor that you can't account for. Mining and transporting oil will never be risk free.
Oil also produces a lot of pollution when it's burned. Some of this is greenhouse gases, which contribute to climate change. But there are other air pollutants which hurt both people and the environment. There are a lot of kids with asthma now, especially in big cities where air pollution sits. Car exhaust can actually change the composition of nearby soild, making different plants grow there. More on air pollution later.
Plus oil won't last much longer. We've extracted almost all of the easily accessible stuff. And what remains is harder and more expensive to reach. At some point, it will take more energy to extract the oil than the oil will actually provide.
There's no way to make more oil. At least not in any timeline where humans as we know them will ever be able to use it.
Security is a major problem. Most of our oil comes from very unstable countries, that could be dangerous to us if we chose. And what if they decide to cut off our oil supply? What then?

Oil has its pros too.
It holds a lot of energy. In the millions of years that its been stewing down in the earth's crust, the energy has been compacted down, so that oil holds a lot more usable energy per volume than most other alternatives. Wouldn't that be great if it didn't pollute, and we had an unlimited supply?
Our infrastructure is built pretty much entirely for oil. Almost all of the cars (at least in America) still run off of gas, and there are gas stations everywhere. You don't see many biodiesel stations, or plug-in stations for electric cars. A lot of our goods are transported by truck, as opposed to train or ship, which are much more energy efficient. And we have pretty sucky train infrastructure, compared to somewhere like Japan.
Tthere are so many government subsidies for fossil fuels that gas is really cheap. Even with the steadily increasing gas prices (they're going back up again) we don't pay near the cost of extracting and refining oil. We don't pay for any of the environmental impacts either. At least not with money. We're paying in other ways, with air pollution and climate change and such. Too bad those subsidies aren't going to help renewable energies more.

I've been neglecting the "fact of the day" recently, but this whole post had a bunch of facty stuff in it. XD