Quotes & Sayings About Petroleum

If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you're willing to wait long enough. — Catherine Friend

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake. — Kurt Vonnegut

The co-opting of the environmental movement by the petroleum industry had a shattering effect. It crushed nascent biofuel businesses, killed research, cut off critical funding, stopped the building of new infrastructure, dissolved powerful alliances and seeded America with doubt over our ability to free ourselves from petroleum. — Josh Tickell

Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food — Albert Allen Bartlett

What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. — Kurt Vonnegut

Saudi Arabian oil production is at or very near its peak sustainable volume (if it did not, in fact peak almost 25 years ago), and is likely to go into decline in the very foreseeable future. There is only a small probability that Saudi Arabia will ever deliver the quantities of petroleum that are assigned to it in all the major forecasts of world oil production and consumption. — Matthew Simmons

I believe we will see a biofuels resurgence. While gas prices skyrocket and we continue to wage wars for oil, while spills, fracking, tar sands and the oil madness of our empire continue, people are waking up and realizing that you can't be against petroleum and against fuels that come from nature. — Josh Tickell

At the turn of the century, Edwin Binney and his nephew, C. Harold Smith, who were in the paint business, thought there might be a market for colored wax sticks and began experimenting with beeswax and some of the newer petroleum-based varieties. In 1903, they produced the first rainbow box of eight wax crayons, which they sold successfully to schools. Alice Binney, Edwin's wife, christened them "Crayolas" by joining the French word craie, or chalk, with "ola," short for "oleaginous," or oily. Many — Holley Bishop

Another thing he laid in when he'd committed himself to one last marijuana vacation was petroleum jelly. — David Foster Wallace

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs. — Wendell Berry

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else. — Bill Moyers

Petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action lie. — Alexander Von Humboldt

Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces. — Michael Ignatieff

Toxic pheromone pollution. How can we combat that?" Charles Groh and I looked at each other. This was it. We'd finally arrived at the hard part. What had to be done. "The first step," I said, "would be removing the factors that are causing the environmental disturbance." "Remove petroleum products?" said the president. "And cell phones?" said the secretary of state. I nodded at both of them, then looked out at the faces around the table and on the screens. — James Patterson

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum. — Kurt Vonnegut

You hear entertainers all the time, saying, 'If I couldn't get paid for this, I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say, 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I'd do it for free'? — Dick Gregory

We must proceed with our own energy development. Exploitation of domestic petroleum and natural gas potentialities, along with nuclear, solar, geothermal, and non-fossil fuels is vital. We will never again permit any foreign nation to have Uncle Sam over a barrel of oil. — Gerald R. Ford

Many bills proposing a national energy program that made use of America's vast agricultural resources for fuel production were killed by smear campaigns launched by vested petroleum interests. The oil companies had a monopoly over the automobile industry, and creating a new fuel would be a threat to their power. Due to the threat ethanol fuel posed to major oil companies, production was shut down and the idea of using ethanol as fuel became a thing of the past, another example of how the greed of power and profit has limited our potential. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Compare King William with the philosopher Haeckel. The king is one of the anointed by the most high, as they claim - one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. Compare this king with Haeckel, who towers an intellectual colossus above the crowned mediocrity. Compare George Eliot with Queen Victoria. The Queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while George Eliot wears robes of glory woven in the loom of her own genius.
The world is beginning to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart.
We have advanced. We have reaped the benefit of every sublime and heroic self-sacrifice, of every divine and brave act; and we should endeavor to hand the torch to the next generation, having added a little to the intensity and glory of the flame. — Robert G. Ingersoll

The enthusiasm of today's youth is as pure and bright as it was in our time. Only one thing has happened: a shift of goals, the replacement of one beauty with another! The entire misunderstanding lies merely in the question of which is more beautiful: Shakespeare or a pair of boots, Raphael or petroleum? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There are many disturbing news. We believe that the production of conventional petroleum reached peak oil already in 2006. The oil fields in the North Sea and the US are collapsing ... time is running out. — Fatih Birol

I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we'd never smelled the fumes of petroleum. — Wole Soyinka

People are kind of upset with British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward. Over the weekend, he was out on his yacht. And when President Obama found out that Tony Hayward was on his yacht, he was so angry, he missed a putt. — David Letterman

The small stuff matters. The company that became the largest and most powerful in history isn't a military contractor or a car company. It isn't the result of savvy lobbyists in Washington, or the happenstance of controlling the supply of petroleum, or some kind of cabal that is beyond the understanding of ordinary people. The largest and most powerful company in history is built by each of us handing over three single dollar bills over and over again. — Charles Fishman

Tell me the sort of agreement that the United Nations will reach with respect to the world's petroleum reserves when the war is over," Ickes proclaimed, "and I will undertake to analyze the durability of the peace that is to come. — William Manchester

This is the deep-space commercial tug Nostromo, registration number one eight zero, two four six, en route to Earth with bulk cargo crude petroleum and appropriate refinery. Calling Antarctica traffic control. Do you read me? Over. — Alan Dean Foster

Even as we work to develop more sources of petroleum for the United States, we must continue our vigorous pursuit of alternative fuels, so that we can be powered by cleaner, more efficient sources of energy. — Virgil Goode

Even as looters were carrying off many of Iraq's priceless antiquities from museums designed to commemorate the "cradle of civilization," only one government building was protected by American troops: the petroleum ministry. In 2007, even as Iraq was disintegrating into sectarian violence, the Bush administration was carefully crafting legal documents - while the United States was still the occupying power - guaranteeing preferential access to the enormous profits expected from production of Iraq's vast oil reserves for ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell. — Al Gore

We are mortgaging ourselves to foreigners on a scale that would make George Washington cry. Every day - every single day - we borrow a billion dollars from foreigners to buy petroleum from abroad, often from countries that hate us. We are the beggars of the world, financing our lavish lifestyle by selling our family heirlooms and by enslaving our progeny with the need to service the debt. — Ben Stein

Persian insect powder, mixed into a paste with petroleum jelly, had killed the lice in her hair, but then she'd inspected her clothes and found them infested with body lice, likely picked up from one of the walking wounded who — Jennifer Robson

But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders -- the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded. — Lee Sandlin

Wealth of time is actually of more value than natural resources (petroleum, gold, diamond, gas etc.) and more valuable than human resources. — Sunday Adelaja

The biodiesel we use is 100 percent, it has no petroleum in it. It was already used in fryers throughout our local area. It's already had one life and now it's going to be used again, which is nice. — Daryl Hannah

Both group effort and individual testimony flow from conviction as to the role of people on earth. In stewardship of the common heritage, a few simple beliefs recur: that all are indeed members of the same human family, that all share in responsibility for the others, that each is capable of responding directly to divine guidance. To seek to translate these into practical action with regard to soil or petroleum or the fish of the sea is not necessarily to do what is directly effective in changing society. — Gilbert F. White

In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportation]. With the trucks parked, greenhouses, tall tunnels, and more seasonal, localized eating, can we feed ourselves? We still have to answer that burning question. — Joel Salatin

Bone-char is a granular material produced by charring animal bones. Bone- char is used to refine crude oil into petroleum jelly. — Kayla Fioravanti

Renewable biofuels are meanwhile making inroads in the transportation fuels market and are beginning to have a measurable impact on demand for petroleum fuels, contributing to a decline in oil consumption in the United States in particular starting in 2006 ... The 93 billion liters of biofuels produced worldwide in 2009 displaced the equivalent of an estimated 68 billion liters of gasoline, equal to about 5 percent of world gasoline production. — Christopher Flavin

When you have energy companies like Shell and British Petroleum, both of which are perhaps represented in this room, saying there is a problem with excess carbon dioxide emission, I think we ought to listen. — James Baker

The consumption of petroleum should be conserved. We need to adopt some austerity measures. The people should cooperate with us. — Veerappa Moily

You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more," said Yo-less. "It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons. — Terry Pratchett

We need to face it, as a nation we have a reliance on petroleum. — Lisa Murkowski

William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: A smell of petroleum prevails throughout. — Bertrand Russell

There is so much oil now in the Gulf of Mexico, and you can thank the folks of British Petroleum for this, so much oil in the Gulf, you can now park on it. — David Letterman

I believe America's chief strategic vulnerability is our dependence on imported petroleum. — Marcy Kaptur

We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980s jobs in their cars and buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home. — R. Buckminster Fuller

The
blending of architecture, solar, wind, biological and electronic
technologies with housing, food production, and waste utilization within
an ecological and cultural context will be the basis of creating a new
... design science for the post-petroleum era. — John Todd

The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted ... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees. — Ronald Reagan

Dad's oil dehydrator was a contained electrostatic field, one electrode down the center, the other the container's inner wall. Principal problem was finding a dielectric to separate the two. Refuse oil poured in came out as oil of the highest grade, dry chemicals, and drinking water. Petroleum Rectifying Company successfully prohibited its use. — John Cage

This is our struggle: to re-bury the coal and slow the flow of petroleum from the earth," she counted them off from pinky to thumb on one hand, "To teach the farming way that cleans the soil and enriches the land. To bring the lore of machines run by energy of grass and waters and sun and wind. To place the love of silence and darkness again beside the love of noise and light. And to cause humans to greatly slow their breeding and breeding and breeding and breeding. This is our struggle. — Robert Stikmanz

The era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak in 2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events will have enormous implications for America's petroleum-dependent food system — Richard Heinberg

Wood was the main source of energy in the world until the eighteen-fifties, and it still could be. Roughly a tenth of the annual growth of all the trees on earth could yield alcohol enough to run everything that now uses coal and petroleum - every airplane, every industry, every automobile. — John McPhee

Until the first petroleum well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil *was* oil. In Leviathan, a fine history of whaling, Eric Jay Dolin enumerates whale Phil's manifold applications: 'It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution.' In fact, its use as a lubricant impervious to extremes in temperature persisted well into the space age
NASA lubed its moon landers and other remotely operated vehicles with sperm whale oil until the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986. — Sarah Vowell

Old foot trails may be neglected, back-country ranger stations left unmanned, and interpretive and protective services inadequately staffed, but the administrators know from long experience that millions for asphalt can always be found; Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere - particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry - they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started. — Edward Abbey

And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical
because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Bombas Tipo OH1 y OH2" (ANSI/API Std. 610. Eleventh Edition- September 2010. ISO 13709:2009 (Identical). Centrifugal pumps for petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries). — Ivan Mejia

That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true. — Wendell Berry

For the 4 percent of our population that is left on the farm does not, by any stretch of imagination, feed the rest. That 4 percent is only a small part, and the worst-paid part, of a food production network that includes purchasers, wholesalers, retailers, processors, packagers, transporters, and the manufacturers and salesmen of machines, building materials, feeds, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, medicines, and fuel. All these producers are at once in competition with each other and dependent on each other, and all are dependent on the petroleum industry. As — Wendell Berry

Association of Petroleum Producers - spoke with federal government officials 536 times between 2008 and 2012, while TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, had 279 communications. The Climate Action Network, on the other hand, the country's broadest coalition devoted to emission reductions, only logged six communications in the same period. In the U.K., the energy industry met with the Department of Energy — Naomi Klein

Question of Official Secrets Act confronts Delhi Police probe By Shreeja Sen | 553 words New Delhi: Investigations into an alleged corporate espionage case are on at full steam, the Delhi Police said on Sunday even as it held around a dozen people in detention after confidential documents were stolen from the petroleum ministry. With the detainees yet to be charged, the police are proceeding only under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 - Sections 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property) and 120B (criminal conspiracy). — Anonymous

The two largest oil-producing countries in Latin America, Mexico and Venezuela, sold petroleum to Nicaragua at concessional rates for several years beginning in 1980. The program was curtailed because Nicaragua could not make even reduced payments. — Stephen Kinzer

As we use our last reserves of petroleum and pollute our world drilling for oil in areas where an "accident" can quickly become an enormous ecological disaster; as our air becomes more and more polluted and unhealthy; as food, housing, energy, transportation, and clothing become less and less affordable; what can save the Earth and civilization? Hemp can! — Alan Archuleta

The automotive X Prize, to a great degree, is focused on addressing petroleum usage and carbon emissions. — Peter Diamandis

Here's a viewer's guide to BP media briefings. Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum they are not telling you the truth. That's the bottom-line. — Anthony Weiner

A significant number of petroleum geologists believe that we will reach the global maximum of petroleum extraction within this decade or that we have already reached it. Peak Oil happened in 1970 in America, when over half of our oil that we gained from the soil was exhausted ... This is very disturbing, regardless of global warming. — William J. Clinton

Imagine people growing hemp and making everything from food to fuel without petroleum! — Josh Tickell

Help fake plants shine by coating them with a little petroleum jelly. — Jamie Sigh

Important reserves of natural resources, like petroleum and precious metals, are the bulwarks for laying the foundations for the future. — Enrique Pena Nieto

A key impact of recent events was a very persistent, if not permanent shock in the oil supply. This was caused as the oil industry hit geological boundaries, which meant that it could no longer maintain the historic growth rates in petroleum extraction. — Michael Kumhof

The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time. — Fred Hoyle

A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water. — James Buchan

Liberia got Petroleum (Oil): The problem of development lies in good leadership and great communication. Some of our leaders want to turn the country's oil company into the Gaddafi regime of Libya that they could rule Liberia and their sons and grand kids can also rule as well. It's a form of oppression. The Liberian people want a leader, not an oppressor or an installed puppet. Someone who will put the country and its peoples' interest first. Not a corrupt politician who's out to rip the country apart, in the name of enriching their families. — Henry Johnson Jr

The world has produced about 1 trillion barrels of oil since the start of the industry in the nineteenth century. Currently, it is thought that there are at least 5 trillion barrels of petroleum resources, of which 1.4 trillion is sufficiently developed and technically and economically accessible. — Daniel Yergin

I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green
in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus
islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams. — Denis Johnson

Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians' need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world's need to avoid the economic catastrophe we'll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon. — George Monbiot

A post-petroleum world will necessitate walking long distances and exerting much more physical energy to accomplish even routine tasks than we are now accustomed to. Most of our bodies in current time are not up to the task. Yet preparing the body for living in a collapsing world is one of the most fundamental of preparations. Although we may not be able to store vast quantities of food or water, may not have our homes or property equipped as much as we would prefer in preparation for collapse, and may not have learned all the skills we would like to master, becoming present in our bodies and keeping them healthy and fit are factors over which we have control. — Carolyn Baker

Gas grills are a no-no. Gas is a petroleum product. Rather than a smokey flavor, it will add a a petroleum-based weird taste into your meat. However, if you already have a gas grill, you can bring in some smoke flavor by tightly rolling wood chips in tin foil really tight and placing them on the top of your burners. — Johnny Trigg

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. — Michael Pollan

The approaching exhaustion of domestic reserves of petroleum and the rapid depletion of world reserves will have a profound effect on Americans in the cities and on the farms. — Richard Lamm

OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn't anymore. — Ben H. Winters

The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century. — Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen. — Thomas Pynchon

Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for a natural disaster or some other catastrophe. — Jason Chaffetz

The Ukraine is still under Russian influence, even if they did give us independence. Ethnic Russians number 22% of our population. The facts remain they will control us economically. We will continue to owe them monetarily for the natural gas, the petroleum and all other industrial tools we need. After they've exhausted our scant resources and we have run up large bills, they will just walk right back in and take us over again. Monitor it closely in the years to come, Nicholas, you will see I am right. It could be easy to disregard this movement of mine, if it weren't for the queer twists and turns history takes from time to time. — Nicholas Anderson

Hugh Liedtke had a simple rule of thumb: Pick a name that started with either A or Z, so you would be first or last in the telephone listings. With that in mind, the team chose Zapata Petroleum Corporation, after the Marlon Brando movie Viva Zapata!, which was playing in Midland. — Jon Meacham

There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation. — James Buchan

Nuclear power, once regarded as petroleum's natural heir, has become less and less attractive as its numerous drawbacks come to light. Coal, the other fossil fuel, is ultimately as exhaustible as oil. — Lester R. Brown

To cause the face to appear in a mass of flame make use of the following: mix together thoroughly petroleum, lard, mutton tallow and quick lime. Distill this over a charcoal fire, and the liquid which results can be burned on the face without harm. — Harry Houdini

The riots that shook Abadan led many Iranians to rally to the workers' cause, partly out of instinctive sympathy but also because of the grossly unequal terms under which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company operated. In 1947, for example, the company reported an after-tax profit of £40 million-the equivalent of $112 million dollars-and gave Iran just £7 million. To make matters worse, it never complied with its commitment under the 1933 agreement with Reza Shah to give laborers better pay and more chance for advancement, nor had it built the schools, hospitals, roads, or telephone system it promised. Manucher Farmanfarmaian, who in 1949 became director of Iran's petroleum institute, was appalled by what he found at Abadan: — Stephen Kinzer

To me the bicycle is in many ways a more satisfactory invention than the automobile. It is consonant with the independence of man because it works under his own power entirely. There is no combustion of some petroleum product..to set the pedals going. Purely mechanical instruments like watches and bicycles are to be preferred to engines that depend on the purchase of power from foreign sources ... The price of power is enslavement. — Louis J. Halle

The Jews might have had Uganda, Madagascar, and other places for the establishment of a Jewish Fatherland, but they wanted absolutely nothing except Palestine, not because the Dead Sea water by evaporation can produce five trillion dollars of metaloids and powdered metals; not because the sub-soil of Palestine contains twenty times more petroleum than all the combined reserves of the two Americas; but because Palestine is the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, because Palestine constitutes the veritable center of world political power, the strategic center for world control. — Nahum Goldmann

Every time humans discovered a new resource, or technique for using mass and energy, one side effect has always been pollution. Why should the information age be any different from those of coal, petroleum, or the atom? — David Brin

American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper. — Wendell Berry

The major source of photochemical smog - petroleum-fueled vehicles - can be replaced by emission-free electric vehicles. — Barry Commoner

The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining, national debts recklessly increased until they are repudiated, and continual revision of positive law, is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors. — Russell Kirk

Turkey's energy bill due to imports will fall with the increase in use of renewable energy sources. We have no control over the prices of petroleum and natural gas. — Ali Babacan

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East. — Christopher Hitchens

The largest mistake would be to start to move away from petroleum, a proven and economic energy source, to more speculative and expensive sources ... The world will eventually leave the age of oil, but there is no geologic reason for this to happen until near the end of the 21st century. — David Deming

The debate about climate change in many ways is tied to the petroleum industry. If the value of petroleum was considerably less than it is, and the value of coal was considerably less than it is, there would be much less debate about this. — Chuck Klosterman

There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful. — Wendell Berry

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there. — Dan Simmons