Posted on 02/06/2016 7:52:31 AM PST by Kaslin
How many calories do you consume each day? If you answered something like "2,000" or "3,000," you're kidding yourself. You consume about 60 to 90 times that many.
True, you probably eat only 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, but most of the calories you consume aren't from food. They're the energy you use when you turn on a light or computer, drive your car, use your cell phone, or do anything else requiring energy.
If you're like the average American, you consume about 186,000 calories a day, and over 98% of it is machine energy. It serves you, minute by minute, day by day, uncomplaining. It is largely responsible, because it powers everything that makes us healthier and safer, for the fact that Americans born today can expect to live about 80 years--compared with under 30 before the Industrial Revolution.
Very few--perhaps 1 in 100--of our ancestors consumed that much energy in a day--mostly in the form of animal and slave labor. The animals and slaves got all their energy from food. Now we get most of our energy from fossil fuels (about 87% worldwide), and most of the remainder from hydro (7%) and nuclear (4%), and only 2% from wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and biofuels combined.
Harnessing energy through machines instead of animals and slaves enables us to benefit from a level of energy consumption that only a tiny minority had three centuries ago--even while abolishing slavery.
Today, however, environmentalists, and politicians like President Obama, call our use of fossil fuels an "addiction" analogous to drug abuse. They warn that we're causing dangerous global warming--though the computer models behind their claims predict two to three times the observed warming over the relevant period. They demand that we curtail our fossil fuel use--even stop it completely, even at a cost of trillions of dollars (over $100 trillion to eliminate fossil fuels by 2030) that we could use otherwise to reduce hunger and disease and increase housing, transportation, education, health care, and other benefits worldwide.
One might as well demand that someone cut his food intake from 2,000 calories a day to 300 because the other 1,700 are his "addiction." Abundant, affordable, reliable energy is indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty, and fossil fuels are and for decades to come will remain our best source.
Contrary to Green-sponsored myth, we can burn oil, natural gas, and coal to generate energy, as we do in America, without causing harmful pollution levels. The wealthier a society gets--partly by energy from fossil fuels--the more it reduces pollution. Poor countries where biomass remains the main cooking and heating fuel for some 2 billion people, causing 2 to 4 million premature deaths and hundreds of millions of respiratory illnesses annually, desperately need this cleaner, affordable upgrade.
Time to break our "addiction" to fossil fuels? Far from it! Time to spread their use throughout the developing world, lifting billions out of poverty and into healthier, longer lives.
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The headline was a question - I responded. So I agreed with the article ... any questions?
I wasn’t sure, that’s all. Sometimes the context is not clear when you only have words to judge by.
While I do like the idea of thorium reactors, he does cherry pick in his arguments against uranium reactors. He ignores the pebble bed reactors which are the current state of the art (that remove most of his safety concerns), as well as breeder reactors which actually produce more fuel while running.
It is interesting to understand why we don’t have thorium reactors now. It wasn’t some conspiracy of the uranium miners or anything, it was a decision mostly by the U.S. government that we wanted a nuclear power infrastructure that supported the production of fissile material in case we needed it for making bombs.
I can certainly accept that decision in terms of national security calculations. However there’s little reason for not doing Thorium reactors now. It’s just that nuclear to the Greens is like a cross to a vampire, and I don’t see a way past that (short of a lot of people going up against a wall).
Quit trying to make me feel guilty for using the brains that God gave me and my ancestors, and the resources He put where we could reach them.
If you dont wish to buy any fossil fuels, then dont.
Impossible.
I’ll go one step further.
Try to NOT USE or BUY anything from China.
Also, impossible.
Engineer Alert!!!! Fossil fuels are the best we have for warming our homes and generating electricity (right now). However, the whole business of sending billions and billions of dollars to people that have a fundamental world vision that is primarily focused on destruction of the Judeo-Christian way of life is no way to survive in the long run.
If we could wean ourselves from the teat of oil for transportation, we would be completely energy independent. Our foreign policy would be free of concern that we may see a blip in our energy supply. The world would need us a lot more than we need them.
We sit on natural gas reserves that could easily fuel our power needs to make electricity that would power our cars. While I am not a big fan of government research or funding, why do we not invest in the infrastructure to make this a reality?
Using natural resources from our earth is HOW CERTAIN THINGS WORK.
It’s not “dependence”, it’s how things WORK.
This argument is as dumb as saying we need to stop our dependency on breathing air. It’s childish and just plain stupid.
The entire reason behind this philosophy is for government to get MORE CONTROL over we little people. That’s it. More money and ultimate power for them; sub-standard living and slavery for us.
I realize the zeal for bombs was the driving force behind uranium US nuclear electric generation. It’s likely until a reactor replacement on an older carrier is requisitioned, the private sector won’t sink billions into unproven tech. The rest of the guy’s talk about retrieving atmospheric carbon to manufacture replacement fossil fuels sounds like another expensive pipe dream. Until liquid hydrocarbons become persistently more costly, why would anybody convert to more expensive fuel?
I think the whole reason he was peddling the ‘capture CO2 and make fuel’ stuff was because he was trying to sell his spiel to Greens. Of course that is a fool’s errand since the Greens aren’t against Nuclear just because it is Nuclear, they are against it because it allows everyone to have enough power and live in comfort. I’m pretty sure the Greens want a lifestyle of austerity for all the lesser people, while they, obviously the enlightened, can live like lords.
Only when something cheaper and more reliable comes along.
Then the liberals will throw a tantrum about it and we’ll be back to square one.
Time to break our “addiction” to fossil fuels? Far from it! Time to spread their use throughout the developing world, lifting billions out of poverty and into healthier, longer lives.
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