Dr. Laird Thompson, not your usual "Oil guy"

This was the speaker I was dreading all semester. I was imagining a guy with some southern accent, one of those leather cords tied around a blue shirt collar, maybe even a cowboy hat. So when Dr. Thompson stepped up with his Texan accent, I feared a long lecture about what oil can do for us.

I'm glad I was wrong.

I think I was kind of bored at the beginning of the lecture, though. I know how oil was formed so to hear him describe the misconceptions of "dino oil" made me chuckle. The different formations of oil deposits, like salt domes, fault traps, and "oil bumps", was pretty interesting, too. The history of fossil fuel use and how we got to where we are today was eye-opening.

But in general, just to hear someone who's worked in the oil business talk about how to live greener lives seemed so... odd. I mean, I've heard of people hired to assess the environmental impacts of oil companies, by oil companies, but just assumed they were similar to scientists being paid by an organization to skew their experiments to report what their employers wanted to hear in the first place. To hear Dr. Thompson exclaim that this last administration was the worst possible in regards to energy production was encouraging. It's lectures like this that make me wish my conservative housemates were in this class, just to open their eyes to the world.

I can't say there were any points I disagreed with, or at least nothing I wrote down or remembered. Maybe we should have a conservative, pro-oil speaker come to class one of these days, just for the ability to criticize their thinking =)