Posted on 06/17/2010 6:01:01 PM PDT by Kaslin
Environment: Our growing addiction to alternative energy was killing aquatic life in the Gulf long before the Deepwater Horizon spill. Abandoning oil will kill more and also release more carbon dioxide into the air.
President Obama sees the oil spill as a chance to make the planet a greener place by weaning us off fossil fuels and pushing us toward alternative energy. The earth and the Gulf of Mexico have indeed been getting greener lately, thanks to agricultural runoff due to a mandated surge in biofuels such as ethanol.
Before the first gallon gushed from Deepwater Horizon, there existed an 8,500 square mile "dead zone" below the Mississippi River Delta, roughly the size of Connecticut and Delaware combined.
Hypoxia, or oxygen depletion, caused by agricultural runoff in the Mississippi River Basin varies from year to year, but it has been on an upward trend as acreage for corn destined to become ethanol increases.
As Steven Hayward reports in the Weekly Standard, a 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that "nitrogen leaching from fertilized cornfields in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River system is a primary cause of the bottom-water hypoxia that develops on the continental shelf of the northern Gulf of Mexico each summer."
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
And it is driving the cost of food through the roof.
And ruining our croplands.
Ironically, the “agricultural runoff” referred to in the article are the organo-phosphate fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. Biofuels are not the answer, but neither is shutting down the agriculture industry since the vast majority of their output is NOT for biofuels but to feed ourselves.
Finally someone calling out biofuels. I thought I was the only one that remembered the great ethanol hoax.
Don't forget, wasteful government programs don't hurt anything if :1) You are told that only the rich pay for them or 2) you get a tax cut (and don't expect #2 from Obama even though he talks about it all the time.)
Ping
Environmentalism is based on a profound nievete. It assumes that technology is inherently dirty while native traditions are inherently clean.
Because wind and sun are considered clean it must follow that energy production based on air and light are necessarily clean. Transforming light and air into energy is, however, nothing if not excesively dirty.
A sensible approach is to develop cleaner production of so-called dirty energy sources such as oil and coal.
Environmentalists, of course, want none of it. They insist that wind turbines are preferable. They do not seem to care about the tens of thousands of birds killed annually by these giant windmills. They are oblivious to the high decible hum that emanantes from these devices. Nor are they willing to admit that the production of enormous steel and aluminum structures requires vast mineral resources and a manufacturing process that destroys the environment in which these monuments to fantasy are created.
The creation of energy is a balancing act. Raw materials that can be mined cheaply with minimum impact on the environment are most desirable. Coal and oil beat air and sun hands down when the extraction tools are factored into the production equation.
Ping
Our runoff’s gotta go somwhere. As long as our deepwater rigs are about to take off for Brazil and other places, we might as well put it there.
And using lots of water, IIRC.
Every year NOAA sponsors the summer SEAMAP survey for the Gulf of Mexico.
It tracks various marine life stocks, and in the end the scientists map out the yearly dead zone of the Gulf.
The Dead Zone has grown exponentialy every year since the ethanol boom, and more so since the banning of MTBE.
The nonpoint source water pollution deadzone in the Gulf is still about 7 times larger than the Deepwater Horizon deadzone.
Good scientists from Texas to Florida have been advocating against ethanol subsidies for this reason for almost a decade, they simply were ignored and or defunded by the Cult of Global Warming Sociopaths who captured the scientific communities’ levers of power in the United States.
They tried to make it look good. Group of US Senators Calls on EPA to Refrain From Including Indirect Land Use Change in Biofuel Regulations
17 March 2009 The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS-2) defined within the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires biofuels to meet specified life-cycle greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to qualify. The law specifies that life-cycle GHG emissions are to include “direct emissions and significant indirect emissions such as significant emissions from land use changes, as determined by the Administrator.”
Depending upon the assumptions and boundary conditions set in the ILUC evaluation, the result can dramatically increase the calculated GHG footprint of a biofuel, far offsetting the presumed greenhouse gas benefits of its use.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/03/bipartisan-group-of-us-senators-calls-on-epa-to-refrain-from-including-indirect-land-use-change-in-b.html
“They insist that wind turbines are preferable. They do not seem to care about the tens of thousands of birds killed annually by these giant windmills. They are oblivious to the high decible hum that emanantes from these devices. Nor are they willing to admit that the production of enormous steel and aluminum structures requires vast mineral resources and a manufacturing process that destroys the environment in which these monuments to fantasy are created.”
Something else that has always troubled me about wind turbines, etc. There is no free lunch in this world. If you harness one source of energy from the environment, you affect the environment in some way by removing energy from it for other purposes. Let us say that we build giant areas of wind turbines...in what way does the depletion of energy in air movement, to make electricity, in a large area cause an effect on weather? The movement of air, even close to the surface, affects/determines the climate. If we disrupt normal surface air flow, how much do we alter the climate? Is it a good or bad change? If it is a good change in the local area, what change does it cause in a larger area....weather patterns are interconncected.
It may be a miniscle thing to remove energy from air flow....I don’t know. However, has anyone actually considered that it might?
Going to another area....let us say that massive areas of land are covered with photovoltaic (sp?) cells. In other words, sunlight is converted into electricity. That sunlight would have normally affected/determined the climate in that area along with other factors. How does diverting a large amount of solar energy to make electricity affect the climate? Does it cause cooling in that area which then changes adjacent weather patterns? Is the change good or bad? What effect would the slight cooling of Death Valley due to diverting energy delivered to the environment there in sunlight to electricity to be used elsewhere affect things? How will cooling Death Valley affect other weather patterns? There is not free lunch.....disrupt the flow of energy in or out to an area, you disrupt the natural climate which affects larger areas.
I am not knocking alternate energy sources, I’m just asking what effect does harnessing them cause. All things are interconnected. Does releasing the stored energy in the form of oil & gas cause more adverse change to the climate than taking away (diverting) energy delivered to or already in the environment in the form or sunlight or wind?
I don’t know, does anyone? I don’t have any conclusions, just questions. I just assert that a system like weather patterns will be affected by taking away or adding energy to the system. Which is least disruptive?
With a fraction of the effort wasted on unless dirty and deceptively destructive "green' efforts, oil can be used even more efficiently than ever.
Easy as pie.
Obama would be lying.
Biofuels cause more destruction to the planet than the people in the GOM will ever see, including this oil spill. When those who demonize oil let me know when the life and animal species in and around the Gulf of Mexico has become extinct and that the destuction of land or sea is so complete that it can never heal itself or return to its former state. Then we can talk.
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