Posted on 06/16/2010 6:31:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s counterintuitive, but oil is greener than “green” fuels, and the oil spill doesn’t change that fact.
A rolling “dead zone” off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.
Alas, I’m not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I’m talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the Gulf’s richest waters, near the delta.
Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there’s no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade, and energy policies.
Indeed, as Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.
Of course, that’s just one of the headaches “independence” from oil and coal would bring. If we stop drilling offshore, we could lose up to $1 trillion in economic benefits, according to economist Peter Passell. And, absent the utopian dream of oil-free living, every barrel we don’t produce at home, we buy overseas. That sends dollars to bad regimes (though more to Canada and Mexico). It may also increase the chances of disaster, because tanker accidents are more common than rig accidents.
But wait a minute — isn’t that precisely why we’re investing in “renewables,” to free ourselves from this vicious petro-cycle? Don’t the Billy Sundays of the Church of Green promise that they are the path to salvation?
This is infuriating and dangerous nonsense, as Matt Ridley demonstrates in his mesmerizing new book, The Rational Optimist. Let’s start with biofuels. Ethanol production steals precious land to produce inefficient fuel inefficiently (making food more scarce and expensive for the poor). If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.
In Brazil and Malaysia, biofuels are more economically viable (thanks in part to really cheap labor), but at the insane price of losing rainforest while failing to reduce the CO2 emissions that allegedly justify ethanol in the first place. According to Ridley, the Nature Conservancy’s Joseph Fargione estimates rainforest clear-cutting for biofuels releases 17 to 420 times more CO2 than it offsets by displacing petroleum or coal.
As for wind and solar, even if such technologies were wildly more successful than they have been, so what? You could quintuple and then quintuple again the output of wind and solar and it wouldn’t reduce our dependence on oil. Why? Because we use oil for transportation, not for electricity. We would offset coal, but again at an enormous price. If we tried to meet the average amount of energy typically used in America, we would need wind farms the size of Kazakhstan or solar panels the size of Spain.
If you remove the argument over climate change from the equation (as even European governments are starting to do), one thing becomes incandescently clear: Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil. The great and permanent shortage is usable surface land and fresh water. The more land we use to produce energy, the less we have for vulnerable species, watersheds, agriculture, recreation, etc.
“If you like wilderness, as I do,” Ridley writes, “the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power.”
The calamity in the Gulf is heartrending and tragic. A thorough review of government oversight and industry safety procedures is more than warranted. But as counterintuitive as it may be to say so, oil is a green fuel, while “green” fuels aren’t. And this spill doesn’t change that fact.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Each windmill in Iowa takes 5 acres of productive farmland out of production, windmill site and service roads.
Here are the other questions:
How much CO2 is generated by yeast cells during the fermentation process when sugars are converted to ethyl alcohol? CO2 is the primary gas that’s created during fermentation.
And what is the difference in CO2 output from burning gasoline v that from burning ethyl alcohol?
None of those flow rates you dream of is correct, American production has gone from 11mbd to slightly over 5mbd. That is a decline in the face of many times over price increase. Peak Oil does not mean the end of oil it means reduced flow rates. Even the largest field in the lower 48 the East Texas Field is still producing 10,000 barrels a day at approx 99% water cut.
It’s very clever of them to use the enviro movement.
The poor deluded souls that adhere to that religion are looking for a way to “matter”, to be part of something bigger than themselves other than God.
So, if you believe in “saving the planet”, you’re a good person,
inherently morally superior to those who “don’t care”.
Rule by experts and in our case “Mommy Professor.”
What will replace oil and when?
The Nazis were making synfuel out of coal 50 years ago! Powered their tanks and aircraft. And, we are the Saudi Arabia of coal resources.
You can already purchase synthetic oil for your car.
I know about synthetic oil but I don’t know about synthetic fuel. But Obama wants to shut down the coal industry, too.
Science is a b*tch ain’t it LOL!!
Ok it is fixed now
Yup......Now that he has shut down the oil rigs in the Gulf, and if he shuts down the coal mines, I’d bet that your electricity rates will double.
That’s if we have electricity!
There was that huge field off Brazil found a year or so ago. The ocean is huge. I would be there is a lot of oil out there.
I see no reason to break my socalled addiction to oil as BO puts it. Its not my fault that I drive a car or that there is no adequate means of mass transportation to get me the 40 miles I travel each way for my job everyday. It wasn’t me that created the saying “See the USA in a Chevrolet” or developed cars to be sold to consumers such as myself. You don’t see me traveling from DC to NY for date night in an expensive to operate jet paid for with TAX dollars or a large jet to go home on weekends. I maybe drive 5 to 10 miles for date night with the family. When these character stop being such hypocrites and use their office to set an example for the rest of the nation then I’ll consider breaking my addiction.
Not to belabor the point but those fields are estimated to contain 5 to 8 billion barrels. That is about 3 to 5 years of supply if it just went to the US.
According to a June 2008 article in Kiplinger Magazine, the United States has enough oil reserves to power the nation for upwards of three centuries. That’s three-hundred years, Mr. President. We are not running out of oil reserves, it’s just that those oil reserves have been declared off limits due to decades of environmental lobbying of our politicians, especially those on the Left. This lobbying has driven the likes of BP and others out deep into the Gulf of Mexico to extract the nation’s needed oil.
Note the following statement from the article:
“...untapped reserves are estimated at about 2.3 trillion barrels, nearly three times more than the reserves held by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Counties (OPEC) and sufficient to meet 300 years of demand-at today’s levels-for auto, aircraft, heating and industrial fuel, without importing a single barrel of oil.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/the_presidents_oil_reserves_li.html
In absolute terms, yes, we will “run out”,
but in real terms, the “too expensive to get” oil will become profitable as the “easy” oil is used up and the price increases.
This natural economic occurrence will lead to alternatives being developed as they become viable, and will not affect economies or lifestyles.
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