Bailing out big oil 🛢️⛽️

One of the stupidest things I’ve read in a while is an article in Sunday New York Times, that floated the idea of bailing out various oil companies who a struggling once again with a glut of oil as the global economy softens and foreign nations are suddenly less interested in importing US-extracted oil and gas due to the Trump Administration’s tariff policy. The article primes the public to be ready for taxpayers to bail out the oil companies, so they don’t go broke and abandon their wells, lest that lead to shortage of oil and gas in coming years.

But that’s pure insanity. We should be getting away from oil and gas, it’s the heroin that powers modern society. Quitting the habit is going to painful, but distributed generation with renewables is a much more stable and sustainable way to power society. Will it require changes and some pain? Absolutely, but we are smart creatures, and we’ve already overcome many of the limitations of renewable energy – the variability in production, the difficulty in storage and distribution. Is the technology perfect today, without limitations? Absolutely not, but if we never try, then we’ll never get where we need to go.

It’s stupid to bury our head into legacy technology. Typewriter and horse and buggy manufacturers had to go out of business, when computers and automobiles came to be. These new technologies laid to lay-offs and they required new skills and new ways of doing things. But they were so obviously superior, even if they did come with certain limitations. It’s just stupid to think we should be powering Artificial Intelligence and next-generation cities with coal.