President Obama’s policies are designed to discourage the development of “climate changing” fossil fuels. The President would rather send our tax dollars to producers of solar, wind, and ethanol (to keep them economically competitive with fossil fuels) rather than earn tax income from the development of oil, coal, and natural gas. Well, the good news is that those government subsidies may not be necessary in the years ahead. When oil prices rise to $150-$200 barrel, and never see double digits again – maybe wind and solar will be able to compete without government handouts. Of course, it will be many decades (if ever) before these alternative energies satisfy a substantial percentage of U.S. energy needs. Continue Reading
Category : Economic Issues, Energy Issues, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, Nuclear
Category : Energy Issues, Environmental Issues, Fossil Fuels, Weekly Feature
The Jon Stewart clip we posted two days ago reminded us that the last eight U.S. presidents promised energy independence. (If you have not watched it yet, don’t miss Jon Stewart on “Energy Independence” ). The promises went unfulfilled, however, as we have become more and more dependent on foreign oil over the last 40 years.
Why have we failed to accomplish this objective? Unfortunately, oil supplies are finite and our energy wants seem infinite. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, but U.S. demand for oil continues to grow rapidly. Our economic growth and prosperity over the last century have allowed us to build an energy intensive society that runs on fossil fuels – primarily oil. Meanwhile, we have not allowed the development of energy sources that would reduce this dependence.
The point Jon Stewart makes is that it is time to face the truth. We are dependent on foreign oil, and we are going to be dependent on foreign oil long into the future.
However, what Stewart does not address is that political decisions made in the past determined our present – and political decisions that will be made during Obama’s term as president will determine our future – at least for a time. We can either choose to reduce energy dependence or to increase it. It is up to us.
How can this imbalance be resolved? There are only two ways. Increase the supply of energy, or reduce the demand.
President Obama makes “energy independence” speeches like the previous seven presidents, but his approach is dramatically different. Each of the other seven presidents did what they felt was prudent in setting aside funds for developing alternative sources of energy, and encouraging conservation.
The last seven presidents, however, understood the supply side of the equation. They knew that we needed to encourage the development of as much U.S. based fossil fuel energy as possible. Their philosophies differed on coal, nuclear, offshore, etc. but they all recognized that fossil fuel supply was as crucial as demand.
Obama, however, has a simplistic and dangerously naïve view. He sees fossil fuels as evil. He speaks out against the oil sands in Canada. The offshore drilling ban will significantly reduce U.S. supplies. The president hopes to place a carbon tax on coal. A cap and trade system would also greatly increase energy costs, create a gigantic government bureaucracy, and make energy development in the U.S. less competitive.
Around the time Obama was voted into office the enormous potential of natural gas shale deposits was becoming evident – and yet nothing is being done (politically) to encourage the use of this new energy source in automobiles. This is a clean-energy windfall of gigantic proportion and yet the President ignores it, simply because it is a fossil fuel.
The fact that his policies will dramatically reduce supply and increase energy costs doesn’t faze the President. The President’s supply answer is wind, solar, ethanol, and wood. But that is not the whole story. The President also has a plan for the demand side of the equation. Obama is intent on changing the way we live. In order to wean us from our dependence on fossil fuels, he is very willing to use economic weakness to get us there. In fact, a forced redistribution of economic resources, along with “de-development”, is the objective.Obama’s new science tsar John Holdren has similar beliefs; that is why he was chosen for this post. Holdren describes it this way.
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. De-devolopment means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation. Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries.”
“The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.”
(I looked up photos to see what I could find under “de-development” and I found this photo of Ted Kaczynski, the Harvard trained Unibomber. He was ahead of his time – a man committed to de-development.)
To claim that the President intends to de-develop the economy seems extreme, I suppose, but how else can we explain the President’s actions. Costly and subsidized alternative energy is not going to grow rapidly enough to fill the energy void – that is a fact. If Obama’s energy policies are enacted – energy costs are going to soar! That is a certainty.
The economy is resilient, but it can be killed. All travel businesses, auto sales, etc will be directly damaged. Businesses will raise prices to recover higher energy costs. Individuals will then have less income to spend on more expensive products. High energy and health care costs will send the economy into another severe depression.
De-development may sound innocuous, but it is frightening. Obama and Holdren have no idea of the problems they are about to unleash.
For those of us who prefer growth, rather than decline, we can hope that sanity returns – that neither the cap and trade nor the carbon tax is passed. New natural gas supplies will continue to grow and that could ultimately save us. Nuclear energy must be revived, but this is not a short term solution. We live in perilous economic times.
Do not skim over this post! If you have not watched this clip from The Daily Show, then take 8 minutes and see Jon Stewart Vivisects “Energy Independence”.
I have not heard anyone use the word “vivisect” since Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot in 1967. That was fun too.
Category : Energy Issues, Environmental Issues, Fossil Fuels, Nuclear, Weekly Feature
We have an excellent report for you. The environmentalist alluded to in the title is Stewart Brand, who recently published a new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. The book is excellently reviewed by Peter Huber and can be found here. Don’t miss this one.
Brand, in his new book, offers a mature example of what real environmentalism should be. His views have changed over the years. He is open to what he acknowledges were errors of the past. He is now pro-nuclear, in favor of genetically engineered crops, concerned with the precautionary principle, etc. I disagree with him on some issues, but respect his approach. A few interesting passages follow.
Consider Stewart Brand’s meaty, well-informed, and mostly sensible new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. The man who used to be so California Hip that in 1968 he made a cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test now presents himself as a “hacker (lazy engineer) at heart,” ready to promote realistic responses to the great eco-existential crisis of our time—climate change. How can Greens fulfill their new mission, which is to save not only birds and trees but all humanity? The man who founded and then edited the Whole Earth Catalog for 16 years—a magazine guided by “biological understanding” and enamored with the planet-saving power of organic farming, solar, wind, insulation, bicycles, and handmade houses—now concludes: “Cities are Green. Nuclear energy is Green. Genetic engineering is Green.”…
The question I ask myself now,” Brand tells us when he gets to nuclear power, is: “What took me so long? I could have looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I weren’t so lazy.” When he got over his nuclear sloth, here’s what Brand learned. (Most of the words quoted here are Brand’s own, but some are Brand quoting others approvingly.) “Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” “Reactor safety is a problem already solved,” and the new reactors are even safer than the old. Waste isn’t a problem; we need the $10 billion Yucca mountain disposal site “about as much as we need a facility for imprisoning dangerous extraterrestrials.” Nuclear power isn’t just the cheapest practical carbon-free option around, but the cheapest, period, when not snarled up in green tape. Scientists “invariably poll high in support of nuclear.” The people so pragmatic that they actually keep the lights lit, he might have added, have polled that way for 40 years, on the strength of reams of data and analyses, as well as the operating experience of our nuclear navy and a wide range of commercial reactors scattered across the planet.
Other Greens, Brand reports, have experienced similar nuclear epiphanies as age moved them closer to a place hotter than tropical. Among them is Gwyneth Cravens, a novelist, former New Yorker editor, and activist who in her salad days “helped frighten the American nuclear industry to a standstill” by successfully crusading to kill a brand-new nuclear power plant in Shoreham, Long Island. And James Hansen, a NASA climatologist and the most outspoken American advocate of drastic reductions in carbon emissions. And founders and former high officials of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and “a surprising number of [other] prominent environmentalists.” Canada, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, England, and other countries that not long ago either froze new construction or resolved to shut down their nukes have flipped from red-hot aversion to tepid embrace.
But tepid may not suffice. “One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of antinuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions,” Brand writes, quoting Hansen. It’s an indubitable historical fact that the developed world was poised to break free from a carbon-centered energy economy 30 years ago. Greens locked us back into it. By demonizing nukes so effectively, they boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. We would instantly cut our coal consumption in half if we could simply conjure back into existence the 100-plus nuclear plants that were in the pipeline three decades ago. If global warming is a problem, Brand and his ex-friends own it…
A reader send in the following PDF. It includes a brief description of how the Horizon, a deep water drilling rig worked, and a number of pictures taken after the accident. As we commented early this week, the potential consequences of this terrible and chilling incident will have enormous repercussions.
These pictures were provided by Julie Cargile, who works on a ship in the gulf. See BP’s Horizon Drilling Platform
Category : Environmental Issues, Fossil Fuels, Weekly Feature
On March 16, 1979, The China Syndrome opened in theaters across the country. I was actually in line to buy tickets for that movie when I first heard of the nuclear incident at Three Mile Island. The problems at Three Mile Island, in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, occurred 12 days after the opening of the movie. At one point in the movie, a physicist states that the china syndrome would render “an area the size of Pennsylvania” permanently uninhabitable.
The nuclear energy industry was already under great pressure from environmental groups, but the Three Mile Island incident put it is a coma. Then, in 1986 the disaster at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine occurred, and that made new projects in the U.S. completely impossible.
Not that caution was inappropriate. After those two incidents, it was only reasonable to step back and consider whether nuclear power was really safe. Nothing is ever guaranteed, of course, but it does not make sense to endure anything but the remotest risk of a serious nuclear accident.
Over the years, new safeguards have been put in place. Today even anti-nuclear environmental groups don’t generally raise concerns over plant safety; the concern over radioactive waste and its safe disposal is the primary issue.
Unprecedented Disaster – President Obama visited the gulf this week-end and called the oil spill situation a “potentially unprecedented disaster”. Unfortunately, this is not an exaggeration. See here.
The environmental record of offshore drillers had been outstanding – not only off the U.S. coast, but around the world. There have been serious tanker disasters, of course. But I don’t remember serious off-shore drilling accidents, certainly not anyhting like what is taking plce in the gulf right now.
The current oil spill, or oil flood, is absolutely horrible. We don’t know how bad the environmental catastrophe will become; we are hoping for the best. Perhaps the damage will be less serious than it now appears, and maybe we will figure out how to ensure that this kind of problem does not occur in the future. Nevertheless, even if our greatest hopes are realized from this point on, new offshore drilling will be pushed back many years.
The economic fall-out will be severe – not today, but in the years to come as oil supplies dwindle. We will become more even more dependent on foreign oil that we would have been.
I have been strongly supportive of opening up more areas for drilling. It is only reasonable to acknowledge, however, that this changes everything.
Category : Digital, Environmental Issues, Fossil Fuels
The link is to The Consumption Conundrum: Driving the Destruction Abroad. This report is a must-read! It is short so you have no excuse. The report was published in environment 360, out of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The authors (two Yale professors) accomplish what has become unusual in our day; they present the dilemma in a fair and impartial manner. Continue Reading
A report published in the Oil and Gas Journal reviews two studies carried out on the impact of legislation passed in 1995 that opened up new areas for deep ocean drilling. By the way, the jobs created and the billions of dollars generated in commerce did not require government subsidies – as high cost, job killing, ”green” energy initiatives do. Continue Reading
New methods of electronic communication require massive new energy supplies. Environmnetalists are beginning to suggest that there should be limits to digital growth. Not Greenpeace, however; they are not ready to take on Apple or Google. Greenpeace says it doesn’t matter how much new energy is required. If we just take out coal (which is the emphasis in this article), limit drilling for oil, put limits on the new natural gas technologies, and ignore the potential of nuclear power, somehow it will all work out. See Coal Fuels Much of the Internet Cloud.
Category : Environmental Issues, Fossil Fuels
With oil supassing $85 barrel, and gasoline topping $3/gallon, the President and the Democratically controlled Congress finally agreed to allow additional, but limited, offshore drilling. Although too late by many years, and too timid in its reach, it is a positive step. See Obama Spares Us from Energy Independence, for the story. Continue Reading