The Middle East!
Safe!
You've got to be joking?
Oil and oil supplies are very much an economic weapon, and the sooner we can wean ourselves of these dangerous economy crippling supplies the better.
Besides, and the oil company representatives will never volunteer this info, that there are other better, cleaner, cheaper, more easily accessed sources.
All that prevents us accessing them is the usual suspects or ideological warriors!
Look, all oil started its life a living algae!
And extracting oil from endlessly sustainable algae is virtual child's play; sun dried and crushed, which is not near as problematic or carbon intensive as traditional refining!
And we have around 700 years worth of cheaper cleaner gas, which incidentally, produces little if any carbon, when consumes in ceramic fuel cells!
As a final resort, we could mine the reef, at least those parts of it already dead and hardly further harmed by a few dozen holes.
Listen, our traditional sweet light crude leaves the ground as a virtually ready to use diesel, needing only a very modest chill filtering, which can be achieved at the well head, using naturally occurring oil/gas field properties!
Meaning, the highly energy dependent, intensely carbon producing, refinery phases are eliminated!
Meaning, the actual total carbon produced from wellhead to harvester, mining machine or truck, is reduced by around 75%, as is the total carbon footprint of any so powered transport/fuel tanker option.
So, those of you who believe we should never ever mine the reef, stop and actually think about who's actual interests you're actually serving, with this dumbest of all responses?
The oil companies? Probably?
Certainly not the environment or the reef, which continue to be much more harmed, by the oil companies' fully imported and far/far dirtier much/much more carbon intensive supplies!
Producing food is intensely energy and water dependent, and for unsubsidized Aussie farmers, is already hard and desperate enough, with multiple rural suicides every week, without some whack job insisting he/she can't access far less carbon intensive supplies, merely on ideological grounds or a greens' sacred site location!
Rhrosty.