(no subject)

Some time soon, maybe in the next few years—the particularly pessimistic say we've already reached it—we are likely to encounter peak oil. That is, we will have used precisely half of the reserves of the stuff left on the planet. Oil is used around the world in far greater quantities than when technology first started to be developed to make use of it, and much of the remaining half is prohibitively difficult to extract, so estimates of how long we have from peak oil to running out of usable oil seem to hover around the 30 to 50-year mark—estimates, that is, from people who are neither employed by oil companies, who just don’t want to hear about it, or politicians, who generally subscribe to the model that the rest of us subconsciously do:


NB - “????” can also be “*shrug*” or “*puzzled Scooby Doo noise*”
At a time when we’re facing peak oil and an exciting precipitous decline in available energy, then, BP’s “Keystone Cops” approach to its oil leak is providing some welcome light relief:

U.S. officials said Tuesday that BP PLC was collecting so much oil from its broken well a mile under the Gulf of Mexico that it didn't have a big enough boat to hold it. [Wall Street Journal]

Specifically, in a 24-hour period the company captured 14,800 barrels of oil. They’re going to need a bigger boat.

What’s more, they intend to get rid of this oil with an “Evergreen Burner”, which burns oil and gas without creating smoke. At the point where we should probably be hoarding our remaining oil quite carefully, British Petroleum is destroying a large quantity of what oil it’s been able to salvage from the enormous amount that’s pumping uselessly out into the sea. This is inspired slapstick—exactly the kind of chucklesome frolics we need to lighten the mood.