I learned much about the petroleum business when I read this article.  I have worked as an accountant with Foster Wheeler and Brown and Root carrying out major expansions on existing refineries in Texas and Venezuela.  I was an accountant with Halliburton’s petroleum mud company, IMCO Services.

Knox County, in northeast Missouri, has a special place in my heart because happy experiences there as a teenager were a major incentive to get serious in becoming a recovering alcoholic.  There are plans to erect many wind farms there.  Certainly, I like seeing my favorite places without the windmills.  However, to save civilization from global warming, people have to do many things differently than they did before.

I would not like to see Knox County when the world-wide temperate rises by 5 degrees Fahrenheit, when Houston and the world’s port cities are underwater.

See this excerpt and then read the entire article:

The main argument against a move toward greener infrastructure seems to be that these changes will cost the nation jobs. I went to work in the oil industry because I wanted money, lots of it, and fast, and going to the oil field felt like going to the source of all money.

Not long after I started, I had a conversation with a cranky gin truck driver nicknamed The Wildebeest. His father had also driven a gin truck, and The Beest was literally born in the oil patch, raised in company housing. He told me that if I wanted to work all the time, to essentially do nothing but work, that if I didn’t mind missing holidays and birthdays and the occasional anniversary, and that if my body didn’t break down from the toil, that if I kept all my fingers and toes, didn’t throw my back out, or lose my nose to frostbite and give up, I’d make a decent living in the oil field. For a while.

A stone-cold fact of life in the oil field is that the jobs are hard, and they are temporary. 

Sincerely,

Ed

The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem

What my time working on a North Dakota oil patch taught me about America’s fossil fuel addiction — and how to curb it.