Re: Everything You've Heard About Fossil Fuels May Be Wrong

Heh heh. He said 'fracking.'  Heh heh heh.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*


On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Mike Findlay <[email protected]>wrote:

>
> http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/31/linbd_fossil_fuels/index.html
>
>
> Tuesday, May 31, 2011 07:01 ET
> Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong
> The future of energy is not what you think it is
> By Michael Lind
>
>
> Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its  final
> decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians  and the
> educated public have been taught to believe in the past  generation.
> According
> to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other  industrial nations must
> undertake a rapid and expensive transition from  fossil fuels to renewable
> energy for three reasons: The imminent  depletion of fossil fuels, national
> security and the danger of global  warming.
> What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the
> world
> has been completely wrong?
> As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last  decade
> the
> technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used  in the oil
> industry,
> has evolved to permit energy companies to access  reserves of
> previously-unrecoverable “shale gas” or unconventional  natural gas.
> According
> to the U.S. Energy Information Administration,  these advances mean there
> is at
> least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade
> ago.
> Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used  in
> both
> electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.
> The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may  be
> only the
> beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of
>  previously-unrecoverable
> “tight oil,” thereby postponing the day when  the world runs out of
> petroleum.
> There is enough coal to produce energy  for centuries. And governments,
> universities and corporations in the  U.S., Canada, Japan and other
> countries
> are studying ways to obtain  energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane
> with
> ice in high-density  formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in
> gas
> hydrates may  equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of
> natural
> gas,  combined.
> If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and  other
> unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the  global
> energy
> picture looks radically different than it did only a few  years ago.
> Suddenly it
> appears that there may be enough accessible  hydrocarbons to power
> industrial
> civilization for centuries, if not  millennia, to come.
> So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt  renewable
> energy
> technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever  may be the case
> with
> Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil  Fuels has been pushed
> indefinitely into the future. What about national  security as a reason to
> switch to renewable energy?
> The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of
>  recoverable
> natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in  the Bakken
> "play"
> along the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play  in Texas. The shale
> gas
> reserves of China turn out to be enormous, too.  Other countries with
> now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to  the U.S. government,
> include
> Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile,  France, Poland and India.
> Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for  blackmail
> by
> Middle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over  time. Unless
> opponents
> of fracking shut down gas production in Europe, a  European Union with its
> own
> natural gas reserves will be far less  subject to blackmail by Russia
> (whose
> state monopoly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in
> warning of
> the dangers of fracking).
> The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China -- at  least
> until
> China borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas  reserves.
> Two arguments for switching to renewable energy -- the depletion of  fossil
> fuels and national security -- are no longer plausible. What  about the
> claim
> that a rapid transition to wind and solar energy is  necessary, to avert
> catastrophic global warming?
> The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming  are
> low
> probability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world’s  governments
> in
> practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority,  despite paying
> lip
> service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were  likely, the rational
> response would not be a conversion to wind and  solar power but a massive
> build-out of nuclear power. Nuclear energy  already provides around 13-14
> percent of the world’s electricity and  nearly 3 percent of global final
> energy
> consumption, while wind, solar  and geothermal power combined account for
> less
> than one percent of global final energy consumption.
> (The majority of renewable energy consists of CO2-emitting biomass  -- wood
> and
> dung used for fires by the world’s poor, plus crops used to  make fuel;
> most of
> the remainder comes from hydropower dams denounced by  Greens.)
> The disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have dramatized the real  but
> limited
> and localized dangers of nuclear energy. While their initial  costs are
> high,
> nuclear power plants generate vast amounts of cheap  electricity -- and no
> greenhouse gases. If runaway global warming were a  clear and present
> danger
> rather than a low probability, then the  problems of nuclear waste disposal
> and
> occasional local disasters would  be minor compared to the benefits to the
> climate of switching from coal  to nuclear power.
> The arguments for converting the U.S. economy to wind, solar and  biomass
> energy
> have collapsed. The date of depletion of fossil fuels has  been pushed back
> into
> the future by centuries -- or millennia. The  abundance and geographic
> diversity
> of fossil fuels made possible by  technology in time will reduce the
> dependence
> of the U.S. on particular  foreign energy exporters, eliminating the
> national
> security argument for  renewable energy. And if the worst-case scenarios
> for
> climate change  were plausible, then the most effective way to avert
> catastrophic global  warming would be the rapid expansion of nuclear power,
> not
> over-complicated schemes worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote to
>  carpet
> the world’s deserts and prairies with solar panels and wind farms  that
> would
> provide only intermittent energy from weak and diffuse  sources.
> The mainstream environmental lobby has yet to acknowledge the  challenge
> that
> the new energy realities pose to their assumptions about  the future. Some
> environmentalists have welcomed natural gas because it  is cleaner than
> coal and
> can supplement intermittent solar power and  wind power, at times when the
> sun
> isn’t shining or the wind isn’t  blowing. But if natural gas is permanently
> cheaper than solar and wind,  then there is no reason, other than ideology,
> to
> combine it with  renewables, instead of simply using natural gas to replace
> coal
> in  electricity generation.
> Without massive, permanent government subsidies or equally massive  penalty
> taxes imposed on inexpensive fossil fuels like shale gas, wind  power and
> solar
> power may never be able to compete. For that reason,  some Greens hope to
> shut
> down shale gas and gas hydrate production in  advance. In their haste,
> however,
> many Greens have hyped studies that  turned out to be erroneous.
> In 2010 a Cornell University ecology professor and anti-fracking  activist
> named
> Robert Howarth published a paper making the sensational  claim that natural
> gas
> is a greater threat to the climate than coal.  Howarth admitted, "A lot of
> the
> data we use are really low quality..."
> Howarth’s error-ridden study was debunked by Michael Levi of the Council on
> Foreign Relations and criticized even by the Worldwatch Institute, a
> leading
> environmentalist  organization, which wrote: "While we share Dr. Howarth’s
> urgency about  the need to transition to a renewable-based economy, we
> believe
> based on  our research that natural gas, not coal, affords the cleanest
> pathway
> to such a future."
> A few years ago, many Green alarmists seized upon a theory that an  ice age
> 600
> million years ago came to an abrupt end because of massive  global warming
> caused by methane bubbling up from the ocean floor. They  warned that the
> melting of the ice caps or drilling for methane hydrates  might suddenly
> release
> enough methane to cook the earth. But before it  could be turned into a
> Hollywood blockbuster, the methane apocalypse  theory was debunked recently
> by a
> team of Caltech scientists in a report for the science journal Nature.
> All energy sources have potentially harmful side effects. The  genuine
> problems
> caused by fracking and possible large-scale future  drilling of methane
> hydrates
> should be carefully monitored and dealt  with by government regulation. But
> the
> Green lobby’s alarm about the  environmental side-effects of energy sources
> is
> highly selective. The  environmental movement since the 1970s has been
> fixated
> religiously on a  few "soft energy" panaceas -- wind, solar, and biofuels
> -- and
> can be  counted on to exaggerate or invent problems caused by alternatives.
> Many
> of the same Greens who oppose fracking because it might contaminate  some
> underground aquifers favor wind turbines and high-voltage power  lines that
> slaughter eagles and other birds and support blanketing huge  desert areas
> with
> solar panels, at the cost of exterminating much of the  local wildlife and
> vegetation. Wilderness preservation, the original  goal of
> environmentalism, has
> been sacrificed to the giant metallic  idols of the sun and the wind.
> The renewable energy movement is not the only campaign that will be
> marginalized in the future by the global abundance of fossil fuels
>  produced by
> advancing technology. Champions of small-scale organic  farming can no
> longer
> claim that shortages of fossil fuel feedstocks  will force a return to
> pre-industrial agriculture.
> Another casualty of energy abundance is the new urbanism. Because  cars and
> trucks and buses can run on natural gas as well as gasoline and  diesel
> fuel,
> the proposition that peak oil will soon force people  around the world to
> abandon automobile-centered suburbs and office parks  for dense downtowns
> connected by light rail and inter-city trains can  no longer be taken
> seriously.
> Deprived of the arguments from depletion,  national security and global
> warming,
> the campaign to increase urban  density and mass transit rests on nothing
> but a
> personal taste for  expensive downtown living, a taste which the suburban
> working-class  majorities in most developed nations manifestly do not
> share.
> Eventually civilization may well run out of natural gas and other  fossil
> fuels
> that are recoverable at a reasonable cost, and may be  forced to switch
> permanently to other sources of energy. These are more  likely to be
> nuclear
> fission or nuclear fusion than solar or wind power,  which will be as weak,
> diffuse and intermittent a thousand years from  now as they are today. But
> that
> is a problem for the inhabitants of the  world of 2500 or 3000 A.D.
> In the meantime, it appears that the prophets of an age of  renewable
> energy
> following Peak Oil got things backwards. We may be  living in the era of
> Peak
> Renewables, which will be followed by a very  long Age of Fossil Fuels that
> has
> only just begun.
>        * Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at
> the New
> America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New
> Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution." More: Michael Lind
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