[Peakoil] BP planning to try deepwater drilling in Australia

[W & C Steensby]

In the end they'll need to ransack every part of the planet. Proof:

In North Dakota, Flames of Wasted Natural Gas Light the Prairie
About 30 percent of the natural gas produced in North Dakota is burned as waste. Executives say they cannot afford to capture all the gas for now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/business/energy-environment/in-north-dakota-wasted-natural-gas-flickers-against-the-sky.html

The matter speaks for itself, I think, but I'll quote George Monbiot anyway:

"Either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses."
http://www.monbiot.com/2003/12/02/the-bottom-of-the-barrel/

"Industrial civilisation is trashing the environment. Should we try to reform it or just watch it go down?"
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/05/10/moneys-hunger/

Peak oil is a process, not an event, and the trashing might go on for quite a while yet. What are our priorities? John Stuart Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), wrote:

"...the increase of wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this, and that each step in advance is an approach to it....
"It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on." (Book IV, Chap. VI, 6.2, 6.9)

Regards,
Walter