What Do You Think Of My Report? Anything I Should Change?

“Oil dependence; It happened slowly. It sneaked up on us… well, not quite. It’s like when somebody uses a GPS system so much that they can’t get around town with their own sense of direction anymore. We’ve become slowly addicted to it, and now we can’t stop using it. Bush says it a lot; It seems to be one of his favorite phrases. “America is addicted to oil.” But it’s seemingly impossible to get rid of our addiction. You can’t just blame it on Bush, or some other random politician. Everybody has to be willing to take the blame. And yes, that includes me. But I mean, I can’t just shut the computer down right now! I’m in the middle of writing a report! And that’s the hard part. We can’t just let go of it all at once, no matter how nice it would be if we could.
Oil dependence has a huge impact on the environment. The seismic waves used to find new possible oil reserves disorient whales and makes them wash up on the beach. We can’t afford this when whales are becoming more and more endangered. On land, a chemical called PAH that is found near oil wells causes cancer in some animals. Most importantly, there is something that will affect all of us. We are running out of oil reserves and eventually we will be forced into using alternative energy. So why not start now?
I asked some people on Yahoo!® Answers what they think about oil dependence to get a perspective on what average people think, not just another view from politicians and scientists. Everybody who answered the question agreed that oil dependence is a huge problem, but they had different ideas on how to solve it and different levels of optimism. One person mentioned that oil is very widely used to make anything from computers to plastic bags, and that we would have trouble without it. He also brought up the issue of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). He said that nothing comes close to the EROEI of oil, and that nothing could replace it. He thinks the only solution is either to find more oil or to change our lifestyles. Two people said that alternative energy was a great idea, and that it’s worth it in the long run to invest in it. But one was against ethanol; she said that with so many starving people in the world, it’s unreasonable to deplete our food supplies by turning them into fuel.
When people think of alternative energy, they usually think of wind, solar, wave, or ethanol. Most people don’t think of a machine that turns trash into oil. The process of turning trash into oil is called TDP, Thermal Depolymerization Process. It can turn almost anything into oil, from plastic to paper to sewage. The only thing that it can’t process is nuclear waste. If a 175 pound man went into the machine (not like they actually put one in!), he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, 7 pounds of minerals, and 123 pounds of water. The process mimics the natural process of making oil that happens in millions of years and squashes it into a few hours. And it has great EROEI too. It uses the oil that it creates itself and reuses water over and over. I think these machines will become more popular in the future.”