If you read nothing else today, make it this piece by Peter Maas in the NY Times Magazine about the impending oil crisis titled “The Breaking Point.”
A combination of greed, increased demand, political inaction and an unwillingness to conserve, and rejection of science has helped to create what will truly be the biggest crisis of the next century:
As Aref al-Ali, my escort from Saudi Aramco, the giant state-owned oil company, pointed out, ”One mistake at Ras Tanura today, and the price of oil will go up.” This has turned the port into a fortress; its entrances have an array of gates and bomb barriers to prevent terrorists from cutting off the black oxygen that the modern world depends on. Yet the problem is far greater than the brief havoc that could be wrought by a speeding zealot with 50 pounds of TNT in the trunk of his car. Concerns are being voiced by some oil experts that Saudi Arabia and other producers may, in the near future, be unable to meet rising world demand. The producers are not running out of oil, not yet, but their decades-old reservoirs are not as full and geologically spry as they used to be, and they may be incapable of producing, on a daily basis, the increasing volumes of oil that the world requires. ”One thing is clear,” warns Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, in a series of new advertisements, ”the era of easy oil is over.”
Read it all.
This is tangentially related.
Don Surber
More is the reason to quit squandering billions on ethanol and coal gassification and windmills and get down to fuel cells and nuke (for electricity).
JonBuck
Hydrogen is a dead end. The energy density is about as low as you can get. It takes 1.3 units of electricity to make 1 unit of hydrogen.
Biodiesel and Thermal Depolymerization are the way to go.
capelza
Saw a lot of wind farms in Alberta of all places…I have no problem with wind or solar power. Being able to be independent of the grid is not that bad of an idea. Not saying everyone should “get back to the land”, but perhaps we need to lose the paradigm that we as individuals have to be dependent on large companies or cartels supplying us with one of the basic needs of all. Solar power is very useful, even here in the dank NW.
Up here, the dairies are using a kind of biogas unit that supplies power and takes care of the water pollution caused by their animals. Small biogas units are being used in “third world” countries to generate gas for cooking and heating and eventually compost. These are made from old oil drums, for cripe’s sake.
docG
A very frightening read. Don’t have a clue as to what the appropriate answers are, but perhaps those calling for a “Marshall Plan” type effort and investment for identifying and developing long term alternative energy sources are on to something important.
stickler
Wait a minute. Wasn’t there something snarky here yesterday about … Gas prices are up, so, of course, politicians feel the need to ‘Do Something!’
Or, is it A combination of greed, increased demand, political inaction and an unwillingness to conserve, and rejection of science has helped to create what will truly be the biggest crisis of the next century…
Well, which is it? Big crisis (which politicians ought to respond to), or blip in the market?
ppGaz
What’s the goal? Whip up readerchurn, or illuminate a subject?
John Cole
Jesus, you people.
The specific post yesterday addressed the idiotic concept of a price freeze, thus ‘doing something,’ but not helping to solve the problem at all. Prices going up, from a long-term point, are a good thing, because they force people to conserve.
Releases in the SPR, besides being pointless, is just political posturing. Imposing price controls (tmeporary voluntary freezes) is actually even worse than doing nothing- because it allows consumers to consume as if they were no problem.
PPGAZ:
Go to hell. I have long been concerned with this issue, and I think it is one of the most important issues or will be one of the most important issues of my lifetime. I have also written about it at length on a number of occasions.
If you think I am so sinister and that shallow, just go away. I won’t miss you- not the way you have acted the last few days. Otherwise, quit being a petulant little prick.
goonie bird
Its time to stop the nonsesne and drill in the ANWR and stop allowing the enviromental-wackos lie about this pristine wilderness poppycock hogwash we got to stop allowing ourselves to be dependent on OPEC and its cronnies
Matthew J. Stinson
To add to what John has said, price controls not only contribute to externalities in the domestic energy market (such promoting as gas-guzzling cars rather than energy-efficient automobiles), but in a global market during the long run, price controls encourage shortages and hoarding because once gas prices are locked down domestically, the oil companies immediately look to those markets where the profit potential is higher.
Boronx
We’ve got the fuel and reactor designs to power the country for centuries, and the means to do it safely.
We have an aging nuclear crew with so little work that there can’t be much of a new one to pick up the torch. If we don’t do something with them, they’ll die out and America will be much reduced in know-how compared to the rest of the world.
dusty
And where does the fuel for the fuel cells come from? Fairy dust?
It’s true that fuel cells will be part of our future, but don’t pretend that they are an energy source.
ppGaz
You won’t miss me? Sorry, I didn’t know this was a social club here. I’m not here to make friends or run for office, I don’t care if you’d miss me or not.
The problem with you, John, is that people have seen your work, and they know that you can be quite the illuminator, when you want to be. If that weren’t the case, nobody would even mention the recent slew of gratuitous snarkiness that seems to be the frosting on everything around here. It’s not my fault that you can’t get any sleep.
I was holding my tongue until that “interminable story” remark this morning. Honestly, IIWY, I’d go have a beer and think about that. Interminable? The death of Generalissimo Franco was interminable. The search for Natalee Holloway is an interminable story. The Sheehan story, interminable? Okay, it’s your blog, if you say so.
But hey, that’s just my petulant, pricklike comment. God forbid that I should dare to speak badly of the blog, I might get bitch slapped. Interminably.
John Cole
And that was your ‘illuminating’ commentary? Thanks for all the help.
And thanks for queering another thread with Cindy Sheehan.
anonymous
Its Bio Terror, then depression.
Sorry about passing on the Nukes.
jdm
John C., the article you linked to reminds me of the ramp-up to the Y2K kerfuffle. I followed it pretty closely because of my job but also because I was amused, surprised, disappointed that people who should’ve known better (Yourdan was my prime candidate), didn’t.
In a meta-sense, all the same concerns and worries are there. And they’re all justified by so-called experts. And, not surprisingly, much of clamor is being caused by people who either want everything to go to hell (eg, the Xtian millenialists – and hard left environmentalists) or want to make money.
Is there a concern? Sure, but I imagine we’ll all somehow muddle through with, at worst, better, more efficient planes, trains, & automobiles, et al as the result.
buckaroo
Near term alternatives are available. Reactors work and are price competitive, it just takes a huge up-front capital outlay and lots of time. We have some of the largest coal reserves in the world, technology exists to convert coal into more useable forms of energy. There was a time when America supplied most of the oil for the world. Our production amounts are about the same as they were back then. We led with development and adaptation of oil as a primary energy source, we can lead with other sources as well.
This is one area where the French have it right, nuclear energy is part of the future.
jdm
Sorry, I neglected to complain about the owner of this blog.
OK: he doesn’t always write I want to read.
And even tho’ I’m too “busy” to make my own damn blog, I manage to spend hours on this blog telling everyone (including that blog’s owner and payer-of-bills) just how wrong they are. About everything.
So, shape up. Or I’ll quit. Reading. And complaining. Then you’ll be sorry.
Boronx
John C., the article you linked to reminds me of the ramp-up to the Y2K kerfuffle. I followed it pretty closely because of my job but also because I was amused, surprised, disappointed that people who should’ve known better (Yourdan was my prime candidate), didn’t.
Civilization doesn’t depend on computer clocks the way it does on energy, and a one time glitch is not really comparable to the future prospects of oil production.
What’s really sad is that the technology leader and largest energy consuming country of a world, elected at this moment in history two Texas oilmen to the highest offices on the planet.
Jim Caputo
Higher prices as a means towards conservation doesn’t make much economic sense because it weakens our spending power on two fronts, at the pump, and in the higher cost of goods. The latter will have a domino effect in all the manufacturing sectors as people will be able to afford less of everything (althought the oil companies will all be smiling).
If our dependency on foreign oil is a national security problem, and I can’t see how anyone could argue it’s not (although I’m sure someone will), then it’s in our better long term interests to come up with fossil fuel alternatives. We can argue over what’s the most promising technology to persue, but we can’t keep our lips glued to the oil teat for another 100 years.
Jim Caputo
Here’s the problem I have with nuclear energy… I just don’t trust politicians (from either side) to not exchange relaxed safety requirements for political contributions.
So come up with a way to make it impossible to reduce the safety levels, and a way to guard those facilities with as at least as great a commitment as we guard the money in our banks, and then I’ll reconsider my position.
srv
While I don’t support price controls, I think the market is about as “free” as natural gas supplies to California were a few years ago. We have an ostensibly educated VP making statements just as ridiculous about Hydrogen Fuel Cells as the insurgencies last throes.
I am a nearer-term peak oil believer, but we’re being played and gouged. I can’t count on two hands how many diesel owners have asked me over the last two years “what the hell is going on with diesel prices?” Nobody seems to know, no technical explanations. Just vague waving of hands about refinery capacity. A little extra west coast capacity on diesel this summer? Ship off 21 million gallons to Chile (sold cheaper than it would see here). Then express shock and dismay when there’s not enough in CA for August and prices skyrocket.
They’re laughing at you and your free market ideals.
If oil is important enough to be talking about National Security, then it’s time to start regulating with a big stick again. We’ll pour $1 Trillion into the Gulf and the WoT by 2010, and I bet in the end my ROI is going to be shit.
You know what we could have done with the $300-500B we’ll end up spending on Iraq? How many wind farms is that? How many hybrid subsidies (you could buy 10,000,000 Prius’ for $200B)? How many Soy-based Biodiesel plants? How many Nukes? We don’t have an energy problem. We’ve got a war problem.
Yeah, let’s keep 200,000 troops in 20 Arab countries. That’ll win ’em over.
Bob
Look, when Gerald Ford left office in 1977 there was a CIA report on his desk (authored under GWH Bush’s watchful eye) which said that the USSR was going to run out of oil in the early eighties and that the commies would be forced to invade the Middle East in order to keep their big machine going.
Carter dutifully got behind selling AWACs to the Saudis (with help from Ollie North!).
Then there was an oil shortage at the end of Carter’s term while tankers full of crude were parked out at sea.
In other words, the last entity I’d believe about the amount of oil in the world is the oil industry. I would go so far as to say we’ll never get an honest accounting of energy supplies in the world until the oil companies don’t control the government anymore.
And the next time we get a president with the balls to stand up to big oil, I hope to hell he keeps the top on the presidential limo when he goes to Dallas.
Bruce Moomaw
Back in 1981, Dean Ing wrote a novel called “Systemic Shock” in which the disappearance of cheap oil brought on nuclear WW III between the two biggest developing nations on one side (China and India) versus the developed nations (the US, Europe and Russia) on the other. In some ways the novel was ludicrously inaccurate, but its central idea is sickeningly plausible.
srv
Jim,
We need real engineers/scientists making the decisions. Have congress create a bi-partisan technical committee (like the base closing panel). All or nothing approval.
Let GE and Westinghouse build one type of reactor each. Standardize construction (hopefully a particle-bed reacton). Create a new uniformed government corps from the Navy (maybe part of the NRC) and have them serve as an operational oversite over civilian plant operators.
KC
It just seems to me like the government should be doing everything it can to encourage the purchasing of fuel efficient automobiles. I linked to two stories yesterday about what’s in the new energy bill and what the administration’s been doing the last couple of years and lets face it: the conservation efforts from both are weak at best. I’m no expert, but why shouldn’t the government offer generous tax breaks to consumers who purchase fuel efficient cars? That is, tax breaks that aren’t limited by an arbitrary quota–tax breaks only for 60,000 cars and only for a limited number of years–but tax breaks that exist until fuel efficient technologies, like hybrid technology, is sufficiently spread to lower the price of hybrid automobiles. And, why shouldn’t the government link tax breaks for auto companies to the actual production and sale of fuel efficient vehicles? Wouldn’t these steps limit our possible supply problems more than the heavy bent towards the supply end tax breaks for fuel exploration, etc.? Maybe a better combination thereof is what’s needed.
KC
Add John’s list of what needs to be done to my above comment:
Jim Caputo
And when the costs of maintaining plant safety become more expensive than the owners of those plants want to pay, they’ll lobby congress for an easing of regulations and they’ll get it because washington is for sale all the time.
stickler
Sorry to stir chum upthread.
Re: nuclear. Sure it’s inevitably going to be part of our energy future, and I’m reasonably confident about plant safety (although I grew up downwind from Hanford, so perhaps that pickled my cortex). What I’m not so sanguine about is where the waste goes and how it gets there. Nuclear waste is the mother of all NIMBY problems, and Yucca Mountain looks increasingly unreliable (probably more for political than seismic reasons, but there you go).
We don’t rely on nuclear as much as France does because we don’t have the centralized, aloof, bureaucratic system France has.
Re: coal. How flat can we make West Virginia in search of coal? Isn’t that what we’re going now — chopping off mountains and scooping out the coal? And what are the long-term evironmental consequences? I read last year about a university researcher who found a stream in West Virginia which tested so acidic that, for fun, he put the water in his car battery and tested the result. Car ran fine; battery kept the charge. Coal has some serious drawbacks even if we have eight thousand years’ supply worth of it.
Jim Caputo
Because they’re too busy giving tax breaks for Hummers. Now someone explain that to me.
Russell
First, nuclear won’t solve this problem. Nuclear is used to generate electric power. Oil is used, primarily, to power vehicles. Unless we move to an electric-powered transportation fleet, the chances of which I put at slim and none, nuclear won’t help. Nuclear is arguable as a replacement for coal, perhaps to a lesser degree for natural gas, but not for oil.
Second, domestic drilling, whether ANWR, offshore, or anywhere else, won’t solve this problem. There’s just not enough there that can be extracted at a reasonable price. Also, unless we drastically alter the way in which oil is sold, anything we pump domestically is just going to go into the global market like all the other oil bought and sold in the world. Barrels pumped out of ANWR do not turn directly into barrels we don’t buy from overseas.
The solution to the oil issue is to use less. This can range from higher-mileage vehicles, to increased use of public transportation, all the way up to zoning law changes to reduce patterns of development that require folks to drive their cars 25 or 50 miles to get to work or buy groceries.
I see little support for pro-active measures from government to make this happen. So, what is likely is that the market will drive it. That may be appealing to small-government types, but the movement from where we are to where we need to get through purely market initiatives will be, more or less, driven by increased levels of economic pain for average folks.
As a final point, I’d say water, not oil, will be the crucial economic flash point for the 21 century. If you can’t drive, you stay home. If you don’t have water, you die.
Cheers –
Boronx
First, nuclear won’t solve this problem. Nuclear is used to generate electric power. Oil is used, primarily, to power vehicles. Unless we move to an electric-powered transportation fleet, the chances of which I put at slim and none
Unless you’ve got some source of gasoline beyond oil, we’re going to have either change our vehicles or they’ll run out of gas for good.
Transportation from the future looks like it will be driven by biodiesel, electric, fuel-cell or hydrogen combustion, the last three all could be powered by nuclear energy.
srv
Jim,
Standardization is already the mantra in the nuclear rebirth crowd. It will signficantly reduce construction costs, regulatory headaches and maintenance. Most US plants are currently profitable, offering the cheapest per-MW rate, and we’ve seen few if any incidents in the industry recently. They know they can’t afford another TMI.
If new plants get built, many will be built at/near existing plant sites.
Waste lifecycle costs is the 800lb gorilla. We have to get over it somehow.
TallDave
It’s almost criminally negligent that they aren’t breaking ground on new nuclear plants this year.
Boronx
Sure it’s inevitably going to be part of our energy future, and I’m reasonably confident about plant safety (although I grew up downwind from Hanford, so perhaps that pickled my cortex). What I’m not so sanguine about is where the waste goes and how it gets there. Nuclear waste is the mother of all NIMBY problems, and Yucca Mountain looks increasingly unreliable (probably more for political than seismic reasons, but there you go).
If people knew how the waste was being stored now, Yucca would be OK’d in a heartbeat.
There’s a plethora of cold war tails out of Hanford that would make your hair stand on end, and Nuclear Power isn’t a cakewalk and it is very dangerous, but it can be done right.
Right now, when we’re rich, when disaster seems a long way off, when we have the knowhow, we can do it the right way.
If we wait till there’s a crisis, till all of our nuke engineers who’ve actually built reactors, all of the physicists who studied under Fermi are dead, when the country’s desperate and low on resources, who knows?
TallDave
There’s another book, “The Coming Oil Shock,” which makes the case that the Saudis are lying about how much oil they actually have. Most people don’t realize that despite all their oil wealth, the Saudis spend like drunken sailors and as a result are heavily in debt.
I expect to see $10 gas in the near future, and $25 gas before I die.
TallDave
New pebble-bed nuclear designs are not only safer than gas or coal plants, they’re modular as well. Some people are saying we could put them in busses and trains.
Food for thought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
JonBuck
I’ve been reading about biodiesel production using a species of algae that 1) is more than 50% oil by mass, 2) Can be grown in wastewater and brackish water. The end result is between 10 and 20 thousand gallons of biodiesel per acre/year. Soybeans or even rapeseed don’t hold a candle to that (50-150 gallons). Check out the UNH Biodiesel Group.
Also look at Thermal Depolymerization. “Anything into oil”. Well, almost anything. High carbon waste products can be turned into crude. That can be further refined into gasoline, though I’m not 100% certain of this.
If this tech is really viable, then we need to start building production facilities right now.
KC
Stickler, I visited Yucca Mtn. a few years ago. At the time, I was working for the Sacramento Municiple Utility District, the owner of Ranch Seco Nuclear Plant. I went with a friend who was a journalist doing a story on the local opposition to Yucca.
Because of where I worked, I was sort of supportive of Yucca. I knew there were problems with the project, but I wasn’t against it. While in Vegas and on the tour, I met a lot of leftwing activists who were so against nuclear power that the word “nuclear” made their faces red. I got in a discussion with one guy who wouldn’t even admit that nuclear power was cleaner for the air than other forms of power production. These people really annoyed me and their general dogmatism made me confident in the project.
However, when inside the tunnel, we stopped for a quick lecture on how everything worked. In the course of the lecture, several scientists got in a raging dispute with some of the Yucca project engineers. It got so bad that it almost seemed like one of the scientists and one of the engineers were going to come to blows. I can’t remember what cooled things down, but eventually we left the tunnel and talk got a little nicer (note: I think I put a comment in a while ago about my Yucca tour and the dispute).
I went into Yucca reasonably confident about the project, but left with my faith shaken. I can’t remember the exact topics of dispute, but seeing serious experts disagree in such a way, shook my faith in the project. I can’t say I’m against it now, but I definitely don’t feel the same way about it as I did before the tour. This is especially so when I see things like this and this come out in the press.
Brian
The market will demolish follies like the SUV and building houses out in the boonies that require 30 minute commutes to the grocery store – or it would if the politicians would stop subsidizing such with tax dollars. They’re under a lot of pressure to keep doing so but it could change at some point.
The fact that we’re going to flush $1 trillion in Iraq that could be spent on nukes, hybrids, conservation, etc., has to be the most brutally stupid waste of resources in the entire history of civilization. The sort of thing that causes Great Powers to fall.
Also, ANWR is less than a drop in the bucket. Probably should drill, but optimistically about a 6th month supply of oil up there.
shark
Lots needed to do. We need to drill in more places IN THE SHORT TERM.
The long term is significantly different. Biodiesel, use that wonderful process that transforms garbage into useable oil, NUKE POWER, and Teddy Kennedy and Walter Cronkite to allow wind farms, etc.
Instapundit today had a wonderful posting about the (very do-able) “space elevator” and how it would be an amazing boon for solar power.
Technology can solve all our problems on this, we just have to allow it. The means oil companies, the greens, EVERYONE needs to let this work
Bob
They uncapped my mom’s oil well in Mississippi in the last couple of years and boy is it producing! Hot dog!
TallDave
You know, Glenn Reynolds raises a good point re this subject: there are a lot of other places oil can be extracted from economically at prices over $70/barrel, like shale.
The ceiling should be sticky in the long run. The catch, of course, is that it takes several years to tap those sources.
B. Ross
Quelle surprise. Told you so, like, uh, thirty years ago. That awful librul Carter tried to get some forward-thinking going re: alternative energy, and getting off the oil teat, and the oilists crushed him. Now we are where we are.
Oh well.
TerryH
I am glad to see the nuclear debate taking off once again, and would like to add these comments:
1-) We are presently managing several thousand tons of weapons grade plutonium. It exists, and we are storing it somewhere. Why not convert it to fuel and burn it in a reactor? Swords into plow shears.
2-) The only discharge to the atmosphere from a nuke is steam.
3-) In my view the waste issue is overblown. The bad news is also the good news. All toxic waste from a nuke is captured. None of it goes into the atmosphere. At the plant I worked at spent fuel is stored in enormous concrete casks that were built to withstand direct impact with a railroad locomotive. These casks are huge, and require an enormous tractor to move them. The casks sit inside a double row razor wire fence with electronic surveillance. A small army of guards patrols the place with real guns, real bullets. ½ mile out from the plant there is a double row concrete barrier wall with manned guard stations. Pre 9/11 security at a nuclear power plant was tight. It has gotten significantly tighter post 9/11. This costs real money, but it is a manageable expense that we are already dealing with.
4-) We presently burn fossil fuel in the form of oil and natural gas in electrical power plants. This is a non-renewable resource that has plenty of alternate uses.
5-) Green is overrated. Way overrated. Maybe in a couple of decades we will perfect these technologies to the point that we can produce large quantities of cheap, reliable power, but that time is not now.
stickler
KC: your comments about Yucca leave me even more disheartened. I don’t want to hear that even experts (reliable ones) are vehemently opposed. Augh. I had only supposed, in my black-hearted way, that Nevada’s rising political clout would block the use of Yucca Mtn. before it opened. (recall the debate about it during 2004 and the pandering both parties dabbled in…)
TerryH:
At the plant I worked at spent fuel is stored in enormous concrete casks that were built to withstand direct impact with a railroad locomotive.
Well, I live in Oregon and my house sits about five miles from a (probably) dormant volcano. There are about a dozen seismic faults running under our downtown. So “locomotive” is not my operative threat level. Seriously (and I’m given to believe this is a problem at Yucca Mtn, too) there are reallly very, very few places west of the Rockies that are seismically ‘safe,’ and with nukular waste we’re talking some serious tens of centuries to be wary.
As far as NIMBY responses go, the radioactive waste response is eminently sensible. Sorry about the rest of the country, I guess.
Boronx
No use crying over spilt milk, but we could have had Al Gore, a man who actually thinks about these things, as president.
stickler
TerryH:
Sorry, posted by accident while refilling my tankard. (Wohl auf!)
Re your assurances about security, I meant to mention that I had a friend who decided to hightail it back from Walla Walla to Seattle in the early ’90s. He drove an Rx7 that he’d hopped up a bit.
He wanted to avoid a ticket, so took HWY240, because he’d heard it gets pretty straight, and deserted, and he decided to redline the thing and see how fast it would go.
This was not the part of the USA to conduct said experiment. He was on the Hanford Reservation, and it was NOT the Washington State Patrol that pulled him over. As he related the story (okay, he was rattled and drunk when he did so, but come on), there were three large black SUV’s full of men bearing submachine guns, two helicopters, and before they pulled him over, a black motorcycle passed him at subsonic speed and cut him off. They ticketed him for 95 in a 55 zone (pre-1994) but the fright and the ten hours’ detention were priceless.
Moral of the story: If you’re on the Hanford Reservation in Eastern Washington, obey all posted traffic regulations.
demimondian
Stickler:
I live in Washington State, near to four active volcanos. You know about them, too. In fact, I live within a one and a half hour drive of Hanford itself (which, if you know Washington State, pretty much leaves me living…somewhere in Washington.)
First, you can throw the whole “there’s seismic risk with Yucca Mountain” bullshit out the door. It’s (literally) left-wing intelligent design — you have to ignore all the data we have about geology and the evolution of the Earth’s crust to buy it. No place on Earth is completely stable, of course, but given the rock patterns around Y.M., it’s going to be stable for a long time to come.
Of course, the Flying Spaghetti Monster may have concealed all the evidence that loyal geologists found to undermine that theory. But I’m a trifle skeptical of such claims.
The fear of seismic activity near a plant is somewhat different. It isn’t nonsensical, but it is unreasonable. Stop and think about the fear of seismic activity. Tell me, please, how seismic would affect waste casks? A sufficiently significant volcanic eruption would give us many months of warning, even if it were to erupt de novo directly under an established plant. We could move the casks long before trouble started. A large earthquake? Less shaking than a locomotive, and, with nothing to fall on the casks, nothing to rupture them. A fissure? That would require an unmapped shallow fault. Unmapped deep faults are everywhere in the West, but they leave their traces in soil cores. Unmapped shallow faults? There are very few of them — they leave visible traces at the surface.
What I’m saying there is that your concerns are reasonable and wise, and that a lot of people have thought about long term storage for a long time…and some of these people viewed radwaste as a potential weapon. Scientists as a whole may not be paranoid…but the radwaste guys from DoD sure are.
Judy
Remember the good old days when speed limits were reduced to save on oil? When did conservation become a dirty word? Drilling in ANWR would temporarily help, but would the oil produced only be used in America, or does it actually go into the world supply? Some many questions, maybe it’s time for some answers.
hrrrrumph
Let’s see….a Texas oilman and a bought oil industry politician who believes that conservation is a “personal virtue” and not “sound policy” conducting secret energy policy-making meetings with industry accomplices giving tax breaks for SUV owners while waging war in the Middle East based on contrived, duplicitous reasoning.
Yep, we got the right guys for the times.
Birkel
Dear Chicken Little(s),
Please feel free to E-mail me when the sky in fact falls. Thanks in advance.
Birkel
DougJ
This is exactly why we needed to go into Iraq. Like it or not, we can no longer count on the Saudis to produce the oil our economy needs. Think of how much higher oil prices would be right now if we hadn’t started using Iraqi oil again.
I do think there is a certain amount of librul dommsdayism here, though. Between, let’s see, the melting of the ice caps (from the global warming hoax), the end of the oil supply, and the loss of the ozone layer, they really seem to think the world is about to end. Somehow, I think that even if their predictions comes to pass — and I doubt they will — most regular Americans will be just fine. Trade in the SUV for a hybrid, wear lighter clothes if the earth warms up, and throw on a little sunscreen if the ozone layer goes. Doesn’t sound that hard to me. Sure doesn’t sound like the end of life as we know it.
B. Ross
Lucky nobody’s bothering to look at those inconvenient pictures of glaciers that once were, and now aren’t. And the ozone layer holes that used to not be there. Slap on some sun-screen–that’ll fix that pesky melanoma! Who needs facts, when you have–faith!
Glad to hear Iraq is producing oil for us, again. Guess this means we’ll finally be able to reap some reward after all the blood and all the billions and billions of dollars we spent to set up a medievalist Islamic theocracy!
hrrrrumph
Doug J., the undercurrent of entitlement and arrogance to your post is chilling.
Have you any sense of decency or humanity?
Mr Furious
That comment is so dumb, it must be the joke DougJ…
John S.
Dear Numbskull,
Once the sky has fallen, who is going to be left alive to tell you about it? And why would you even care at that point? You’ll be a goner, too.
Fatalistically yours,
John S.
BinkyBoy
Wow, I never knew of the Fat Guy before. Anytime I want to read a horribly written blog that falls so far short of a logical argument at any point, then I’ll rush over there just so I can have the feeling of being brain dead without the hangover effects the next day.
Sheesh…
ppGaz
It’s just the end of intelligent life, Doug …. not something that would affect you, personally.
Kirk Spencer
I keep seeing this bit of a blind spot, so I’ll debunk it here.
The constant is, “There’s plenty of oil. Once gas prices hit/break $60 (or 70 or whatever) it becomes economical to produce it.” Yep, they’re right. But they’re missing a critical point: That 60 or 70 per barrel becomes the new floor. The new production won’t drop the prices, it just slows the climb. Consider a moment – it costs a LOT of money to set up those extraction sites. They’re not going to be emplaced for a surge situation – they want to not only recover their investment but also to make a profit.
If the only way we can afford to maintain oil production is to pay $60 per barrel, oil and gas prices are not coming down. Add in the fact that demand is increasing at a rate that matches if not outstrips estimates of future oil production, and I wind up laughing at anyone calling current prices an aberration. No, instead they’re a harbinger.
Welcome to the future.
ppGaz
Sixty-seventy dollar oil (and up) is not the end of anything, other than the bubble of cheap oil. There will be painful gyrations during an adjustment period, and then higher prices will drive responses. Responses will include huge increases in vehicle efficiency, extraction from oil sand and oil shale deposits, and so forth.
The major effects will be on everyday economic mechanisms during a transition period. We’re already seeing the first effects, as people drive and spend less. There will be inflationary pressures on prices, affecting consumers and wage earners.
A public which eschews planned and managed transition to reductions in energy consumption and shifts in energy sources, will pay the price for whistling past the graveyard for the last 20 years, and get stung hard by these changes.
While all this is going on, Faux News will be reporting daily that opposition to administration energy policies is unpatriotic and pro-terrorist. Rush Limbaugh will talk about Hillary Clinton’s Chevy suburban, and no sign of Natalee Holloway will be found in Aruba.
goonie bird
Nothing put the audubon society at the throats of the seirra club,greenpeace,world wildlife fund then the way these eco-freaks push for wildfarms and wind turbines becuase wildturbines are bird killers and audubons egret is on a war path against WWFs panda
hrrrrumph
Until 2009, when Faux will report of freedom haters skipping whilly-nilly through the white house engaging in god-knows-what forms of decadance and debauchery.
Scott Chaffin
Never heard of you either, Binky…
DougJ
It’s a rejection of REAL SCIENCE that has led to this whole crisis. The libruls believe that we will somehow magically discover a new source of energy, maybe hydrogen, maybe solar. The reality is that fossil fuel is all we know how to produce and if that means drilling on the libruls’ precious little “protected areas” well that’s the way the cookie crumbles, or, better, the oil barrel fills. Deal with it, your “science lovers”.
Randolph Fritz
John, old news; Al Gore (an excellent science reporter) wrote about it in Earth in the Balance, and it was old news then. What to do, what to do…
Well, to begin with, we can start designing and modifying buildings to take advantage of local climate and sunlight. Then we can think about modifying our cities to reduce the energy demands of day-to-day transportation.
Nuclear power? Best if we could hire saints and angels to run the system. Failing that, maybe, maybe, if we really use it to replace petroleum.
But we are late on planning, late on research; the rest of the world is leapfrogging us.
Randolph Fritz
By the way, Terry Gross interviewed Peter Maas on Fresh Air today; you can hear it at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4809996
I direct anyone interested in climate-responsive building and design to Brown and DeKay’s Sun, Wind, and Light. Get the second edition, which is nearly twice the thickness of the first.
pfrets
When gas hits $5 a gallon the shit will hit the economic fan, and it won’t matter what party you’re part of…everyone will jump on the ‘energy independence’ bandwagon.
Libruls who scream about emmisions and oppose new refineries will jump onto biodiesel. On the other side…once America wakes up and understands that hydrogen is just another teat on the big-oil pig, repugs will jump onto solar and wind power. No matter which party…get energy independent or die a humiliating political death. It’ll be the only way to get re-elected once gas hits $5 per gallon.
PS…oil will hit $100 a barrel, and gas $5 per gallon, just as soon as the Iraqi civil war begins in ernest. That should happen just as soon as our troop deployment levels fall below the 100,000 mark. Surprised it hasn’t happened already…we’re largely ineffective against the insurgency right now.
goonie bird
Hey what ever became of REDDY KILOWATT? can you remeber the little guy with the body,arms and legs that looked like lightning bolts a rond head lightbulb nose outlet ears and mickey mouse shoes and the lightning bolts sticking out of his head?
tzs
And the Japanese and Europeans will make out like bandits because for the past N years they’ve been designing stuff to be energy-sipping, not energy-guzzling.
Bye-bye American car manufacturers. Why didn’t you go for higher efficiency vehicles when you could?
jg
I prefer BMW to any american car anyway.
DougJ
In effect, it is. If we’d started drilling in Alaska 10 years ago, as we should have, it would have reduced our dependency on Middle Eastern oil, which might have allowed us to play hardball with the Middle Eastern countries on Al Qaeda, which might have prevented 9/11. All hypothetical, of course, but to keep us safe, we must have a better energy policy. And the new Bush plan sounds pretty damn good to me.
jg
There’s about a one years supply in ANWR and we don’t import a majority of our oil from the middle east.
Even oil companies don’t want to go to ANWR. Its too remote. They’d have to get there, set up drills, create a storage area, create pipelines to get it out of there plus they need to build a mini city since people will be living on site. Its not worth it if the reserve will be tapped out in under a decade.
Of course the right would rather say the only opposition to ANWR drilling is caribou loving hippies.
DougJ
Well, one year of oil from ANWR may not seem like much but if we bought no oil from the Middle East (or Venezuala) for a year that would bring their economies to a near halt. It would give us a lot of bargaining power. If we’d done that with the Saudis, as Cheney and others suggested in the nineties, we might have been able to get them to crack down on Al Qaeda. That was probably our best shot at stopping 9/11.
Randolph Fritz
Reddy Kilowatt is being superseded by Greeny Megawatt