Oil and the piping plover

Good morning,

    if you have very powerful telescopes on Europa, you might have noticed that there's been a change here on Earth.  There's a big oil slick down in the Gulf of Mexico caused a couple of months ago by trying to drill a well on the sea floor on the cheap, so to speak.  Saving about a million dollars in drilling operations, the perpetrators have now caused an environmental catastrophe that is going to cost themselves at least $20 billion (20,000 times as much as they planned to save) and the country and rest of the world ecological damage whose monetary value is simply immeasurable.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, oil (also called petroleum) is a liquid formed from fossilized organisms laid down many millions of years ago.  We use the stuff to power and/or produce just about everything here on Earth.   The problem is that, although there's a lot of oil under the ground, we consume it quicker than we can find it.  And, it's not being made any more – at least not at a rate that could ever be useful to us.

I'm interested to know what you use for energy up there so far from the sun.  We haven't figured out an alternative yet, but we are definitely looking for ideas, as the stuff's going to be all used up shockingly soon.  One plan is to use the wind to generate electricity (you have that, right?).  But the oil lobby is determined to stop that by using "pseudo-green" arguments like dangers to piping plovers and whales.  As it happens, the piping plovers and whales aren't of course threatened in any way by wind farms.  But they are two species that are massively threatened by the oil spill.  Indeed, the plovers which winter on the Gulf shore could even be wiped out entirely by the oil.

But this kind of thing is normal for our world.  The dollar (the pound, yen, yuan, etc.) rules.  Truth exists on a sliding scale.  There is no truth so absolute or profound that someone can't be found to deny it, given sufficient cash incentive.  Examples abound, depending on which historical period you'd like to examine.  Probably the most ludicrous, and long-lived, example of all is the subject of evolution by natural selection.  We'll look into that in a future letter.

Meanwhile, you'd expect that on Earth we would be guarding every precious drop of oil for the future.  A relatively easy way to do that would be to impose a large tax on the sale of gasoline (the derivative of petroleum that we put in our cars).  Not only would it cause us to be less wasteful, but the proceeds from the tax could, among other things, be used to research new forms of energy.  However, we have a democracy here which explicitly excludes voters from among the generation most affected by the future oil shortage and any presidential candidate who proposed such a tax wouldn't last five minutes in the race.

From a crazy world,

Phasmid