Big Oil reluctant to trip down Obama's golden road

Can you honestly tell me that anyone could be surprised by this NY Times article about oil companies:

"...many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made."

Or this:

"The oil companies have frequently run advertisements expressing their interest in new forms of energy, but their actual investments have belied the marketing claims....

Shell, for example, said it spent $1.7 billion since 2004 on alternative projects. That amount is dwarfed by the $87 billion it spent over the same period on its oil and gas projects around the world."

Of course they are straying from the golden path of green technologies! They are in the business of profit. Americans, despite the growing number of motorized toy skates on the road, are forever addicted to their gas guzzling cars and trucks.

But it isn't just the vehicles as the article hints at. "The world consumes about 85 million barrels of oil a day." I'm sorry, be we'd have been dead a long damn time ago if that was all going into the gas tank.

That oil is in toys, plastics, cookware, roads, building materials, lawnmowers,...nearly everything we own, buy, use, and throw away is made from oil.

Is it really any surprise that our reliance on oil isn't such an easy habit to kick?

The world in numbers

You wanna see something creepy? Guy came to my job to help out with some repairs (damn broken heater), and we got to talking about the number of people who use the internet in a given day.

It's hard to say what I'm more freaked out by, the global population, the growing debt, the carbon dioxide output, or the number of people who spend their time in front of some sort of electronic device (TV, computer, cell phone, etc.) vs. the number of new books published.

What did you find most interesting/creepy?

Going Green American Style

This. Is. Amazing.

And kinda sad I think.

Remember the days when people did a thing just because it was the *right* thing to do? Not because “as Americans, we are good at entertainment and competition....”

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for going green and damn if I don't hope SLC will employ something similar.

But what part of "without the Earth you will DIE" don't people understand?

Still, props to California. Always on the cutting edge of smart.