Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The mountains in Rifle, Colorado, are rich in reserves of oil shale.
Environmentalists consider exploitation of “difficult oil” to be beyond the pale:
both for its perpetuation of fossil fuel reliance and for the surface despoliation
its mining will cause.
Handbook
. “Allowing people to mentally explore what their current life-
styles would be like if the inflow of cheap oil were to cease is a powerful
way to get people to think about the vulnerability of their oil-dependent
state. It can focus the mind more than climate change because it can seem
to be more obviously relevant to people's everyday lives.” One of the things
that Hopkins appears to find appealing is that the peak-oil campaign has
no government endorsement - in contrast to climate-change campaigns
- and therefore the transition movement can be a bottom-up movement,
not top-down.
Then there are those who fear that publicity about peak oil might panic
the world into replacing exhausted stores of conventional oil with dirtier
unconventional oil from Venezuela and Canada, rather than mobilizing
renewable energy. Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth explains why many
green organizations, if anything, underplay peak oil. “We do not focus
much on the issue, partly because of the possible ambiguous response to
peak oil”, he says. “The other reason is that if you
do
focus on peak oil,
you enter into a debate about geology in which there is no solid level of
