All of the oil they take out of the ground, does it not serve a purpose?

Question

All of the oil they take out of the ground, does it not serve a purpose?

Answer 1

off course it serves a purpose, it's our fuel source and us greedy people want it in the same way that a kid wouldn't say no to a bar of chocolate.  A kid doesn't think that chocolate is real bad for them, he just knows it tastes good.  In the mean time we starve our environment of it's natural substance and rip it dry on account of our greed.

Answer 2

i could be wrong, but they do not really serve a purpose. oil, or the technically correct term, petroleum, comes from the biomass of dead dinosaurs and other living things that lived millions of years ago, that got compressed under crushing weight, like under tons of rock or at the bottom of deep sea. it does not therefore serve a necessary purpose to geologic processes, but is a product of it. it's not much different from mining anything else, really.

Answer 3

I've been making this argument for a while - it's the earth's lubricant - the tectonic plates need that oil to slide gently across each other.

Removing the oil is causing the plates to grind violently and causing more earthquakes and tsunamis.

Yeah, but that's the rambling of a crackpot - the pockets of oil and gas really don't serve a purpose.

Answer 4

The issue is not so much of purpose but effect that the instillation of drills will cause on areas and the fact that oil is and will run out.  We could drill in Alaska only to remove most of the oil and still find ourselves in the situation of disturbing areas that have delicate natural balances and find ourselves (continually / again) using oil sources that come from areas that our not in our domain and have issues concerning stability and conflict issues.  

Oil fields are not renewable and at this time it is apparent that we will be in a situation that requires alternatives.  Why not start the adjustment now and take advantage of the ability to experiment/ investigate with harvesting cleaner, efficient and more dependable energy sources?