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
Most of that is tar sands and heavy oil. For those to be commercial, you need prices upward of $100, which will be sooner than later. We have about twenty years worth of supply in the US from conventional reservoirs. Plenty of natural gas, not much oil left. ANWR has a few billion barrels, the equivalent to three to five years of demand.
Oil Shale Resources
Green River Formationclick to view larger image
Location of the Green River Formation Oil Shale and Its Main Basins
While oil shale is found in many places worldwide, by far the largest deposits in the world are found in the United States in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.2 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable; however, even a moderate estimate of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation is three times greater than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, the estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Green River Formation would last for more than 400 years1.
More than 70% of the total oil shale acreage in the Green River Formation, including the richest and thickest oil shale deposits, is under federally owned and managed lands. Thus, the federal government directly controls access to the most commercially attractive portions of the oil shale resource base.
http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/oilshale/index.cfm
LMAO! But wait....that’s the vision of the Obama administration for all of us...I stopped laughing.
...
He lives in a fairy tale world and behaves as if he is completely devoid of common sense.
The Gulf States are drowning in oil and he uses the Oral Office (Oral in his case because he has diarrhea of the mouth) to sell everyone windmills?
Yep, he's nuts!
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.”
Problem solved: mandate exclusive production of electric cars, and subsidize them, until they are affordable.
Just think of all the jobs that are created.
With solutions right before us like that, why can’t the Congress just do it?
(that’s sarcasm, by the way.....)
all libs live in a world where solutions without tradeoffs exist
their entire ideology is based in lies and myths
Yeah, right after I hit “Post”, I forgot to add oil shale. Do you know how many barrels of water it takes to make a barrel of oil from the Green River Shale? More than is in the Green River, that is for sure. Not to mention, basically strip-mining BLM land and reclamation. The same problem exists for methanol production - it uses huge quantities of water. As soon as the economy recovers (if ever under Obamao), oil will be over $100 a barrel and it won’t be getting any cheaper in the future.
Time will tell. The experts have been predicting oil at all sorts of prices yet it remains under $80 as of now. Much higher, though, the the economy will take another major hit. We need to take advantage of our own resources.
And Obama lives in a world where professorial airheads can creat new jobs by demanding that consumers use paper and not plastic...and the solar panel industry will pick up the slack caused by outlawing dirty factories.
And if he raises the taxes on gas guzzlers, it will generate tax revenues to give to poor union managers AND make everyone ride bicycles.
The only thing certain about Obama is that he is certifiable!
Which is why genetically engineered saltwater algae biofuels will likely replace petroleum: free and practically unlimited land, water, and sunshine. Petroleum originally comes from saltwater algae so this is not far fetched. We could replace the entire petroleum industry using only 2% of the ocean surface. This biggest problem will be preventing runaway super-algae growth. If we don't have a way to kill the super-algae we could end up with the oceans covered 20 feet deep with biofuel and the atmosphere 90% pure oxygen.
Super-algae will also be used to create Earth-like atmospheres on other planets and moons for us. Maybe algae was originally sent to Earth to prepare it for someone else.
It's mostly the hoi-polloi wanting to keep the other hoi-polloi from getting ahead. Envy is most violent towards people of the same demographic.
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