After Man....

Great show on the Discovery Channel about life after mankind last night.  It showed how very little evidence of mankind would be visible in 1,000 years and maybe only portions of the Great Wall of China, and buried remnants of the Great Pyramids after 10,000 years.  So, in a microsecond of geological time, all evidence of man is gone, destroyed by the force that is Nature, who, lest we forget, is a cruel, inexorable bitch.  Electromagnetic indications of our existence in space?  Signal strength dissipated below the noise level of the cosmos in no more than a light year.

Remember these facts when listening to someone hold court on "how fragile the environment is".  All of us in the oil business have this built in BS detector because we have worked around facilities developed in 00's, 10's and 20's that were, by todays standards, environmental disaster areas that would bankrupt every Major combined to clean up that have naturally remediated over the 100 or so years that we did nothing to help.

By the way, this month's Forbes has an interesting section on how Venezuela's Hugo Chaves, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Rafael Correa Delgado of Ecuador are using Environmentalists to misdirect western angst against Major Oil Companies instead of their own horrible National Oil Company monopoly practices.  The case in point is a field that Chevron turned over to the the Ecuador national oil company over 40 years ago and which was third party confirmed as clean at the time.  Hugo et al are now suing Chevron for what happened subsequently via National Oil Company own worst practices and using it as a huge propoganda tool in the western press.  They invited Darryl Hannah, the world renowned expert on heavy metal and hydrocarbon contamination contamination, anthroplogist specializing in indiginous South American tribes, and recent soft porn movie star, at least in the movie I saw on HBO late night after the wife was asleep... is she a Doctor?  I forget.  Anyway, a real renaissance woman, Darryl, to comment on the big bad American oil company and how Hugo and Friends are really nice.  Like puppies.

Imagine selling your car to a hoodlum, and ten years later having the hoodlum suing you for his money back because the now broken-down wreck "was defective", and getting the dumbest newscaster around to validate this ridiculous story ala Marvin Zindler.  "Slime in the Oilpits!".  Fortunately, the Ecuadoran Supreme Court has thrown these allegations out before, but in the best practices handbook for despots, they just load the court and try again.  Nice, huh?

Oh well.  Choose to be stupid if you want, I guess.  It is your right as an American, the country notable for having obesity and attendant diabetes as its biggest poverty related problem.  Can gout be far behind?

Comments

[Scott]

More often than not, pollution in Texas is understated, not overstated. Do you like to fish in Texas Rivers and streams? Be sure to catch and release:

http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/seafood/Survey.shtm#advisory

(see current consumption advisories)

Even Canyon Lake, on the once pristine Guadalupe River, is so polluted there is an advisory against eating the fish.

[fred mrozek]

The notion that nature will erase all signs of human technology in 1000 or even 10,000 years is questionable. Even if a massive glaciation scraped the northern parts of the continents clean, there would be alot of durable residues in unglaciated areas and durable artifacts which would survive for millions of years after burial. If fossilized trees survive for tens of millions of years, so also would the forms of all manner of engineered structures, which though mangled, would nonetheless preserve evidences of artificial shaping and forming operations. Think of laminated glass windshields from cars, ceramic roofing tiles, buried drill casing, buried and refilled mine shafts with roof supports, raised berms of railroads and interstate highways. And another sign would be the stratigraphic evidence of rapid withdrawl of oil, coal and other minerals from reservoirs and ore deposits during the period of time just before the extinction of the SUV megafauna.
In truth, I suspect that the evidence of mankind's impact on the Earth would be detectable to careful and patient observers for a hundred million years or more. It just depends on how carefully and how deep such future observers look.

[Scott]

This is some of the best blogging I have seen here.

Thanks

[Roy]

Also the show on Chernobyl Wildlife is very interesting, similar point.