Comment on a HuffPo column

Here’s a comment I posted on an opinion piece written by Richard Stuebi, The Petroleum Industry: Past the Tipping Point?

Interestingly, where it’s the minerals and non-renewable resources that should run out: oil, gold, aluminum, etc.; it’s been the renewable stuff that’s proven to be exhaustible: mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, cedars of Lebanon, gorillas. The paradox is that by using non-renewables, we are able to conserve the renewables. Perhaps we need to use more oil and natural gas? For instance, two-thirds of the wood used in the world goes toward cooking and heating in the developing world. Butane could replace that wood and drastically cut CO2 emissions and cut health problems caused by wood stoves.

Let’s not gush about our clean energy options


Estimates regarding the rate of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil blowout get spewier with each succeeding news cycle. The mess being made requires that we Americans consider what we are willing to pay—economically and environmentally— for energy.

I didn’t see President Obama’s live televised remarks to the nation on the BP oil spill but watched it online. He apparently chose not to use the speech I drafted, “Our Energy Future,” for his text. More’s the pity. He chose another path and the punditocracy are weighing in on how he said it and what he said or, more likely, didn’t say. It was a sober speech, part elegy and part jeremiad. I agreed with much of what he said: stanch the spill, help the Gulf Coast clean up and get back on its feet, investigate the blowout’s cause, tighten the regulatory oversight, and hold BP accountable.

Then our President went on set out his vision, “Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil… Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own (energy) destiny.”

It’s a nice vision, full of gumdrop trees and candy kisses where the air will be so pure from our clean energy that we would have to smoke six packs of cigarettes each day to remember what the air used to be like. In the oil-free America the air will be so clean that the sun will seem like it’s gotten a new lease on life, it will be so bright. That is, if we can see the sun for all of the photovoltaic panels that we will need to power our electric cars, electric SUVs, and electric pickup trucks; electric eighteen-wheeler trucks, electric trains, electric motorcycles and scooters, electric boats and ships, and electric planes and jets. You see, our transportation industry runs on oil and if we want to replace the high-density energy of petroleum with wind or solar we’re going to need a LOT of space.

So, instead of gumdrop trees where birds flit about, imagine 32,150 square miles of wind turbines that kill eagles and interrupt bird migrations. That is what is needed to meet California’s present electricity needs, which are in the neighborhood of 97,000 megawatts. Or, instead of candy-cane cactus, imagine 5,770 square miles of solar photovoltaic panels in the Mojave Desert (about 20% of the Mojave) disrupting habitats of endangered plants and animals. Imagine the new power transmission lines to deliver the electricity. Granted, to some extent, this is “inside-the-box thinking;” some PV panels can be put on rooftops so that not all the displacement would be on undeveloped land (One source I checked had put 27 PV panels on his average sized house in sun-rich Austin, TX. The panels produced about one-third of a typical family’s electricity use.).

Now imagine where those “guilt-free” “clean-energy” machines will be manufactured. If you said, “the United States of America,” thanks for playing; you may sit down. You’re wrong. Try China. So instead of getting our fossil fuel from countries such as Canada and Mexico (only 11% of our domestic oil supply comes from OPEC), we will get our batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines from China instead. Wind turbines, photovoltaics, and electric car batteries need rare-earth metals (such as lanthanum and neodymium) and China has a near monopoly on rare-earth mining. America’s one rare-earth mine closed in 2002. It’s not that rare-earth metals are terribly rare, it’s that mining for them leaves radioactive waste. China’s state-run economy won’t care about such concerns. It will ignore the short-term environmental consequences to lock up the market and get the (low-paying) jobs for growing its middle class.

So-called clean and green energy carries considerable downsides, just as fossil fuel does. Since all actions have consequences, costs and benefits have to be assayed. As that great Roman philosopher, Anonymous, once observed, “Res ea non est quae prandium gratuitum aquet.”

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.


BP oil spill: A teachable moment?

“I want to really challenge the idea that we can’t move into renewable energy sources a lot faster. We put a man on the moon pretty fast…What is really sad now is that Obama is not using this moment as a teachable moment to bring the country together.” – Arianna Huffington (on KCRW’s Left, Right, and Center).


The challenge President Obama faces, if this is indeed a teachable moment, is what to teach.

I took the liberty of drafting a speech for President Obama a while ago. He chose not to use mine, but you can see what might have been.

Draft: “Our Energy Future”


My fellow Americans, I know there’s a Boston-L.A. playoff game on tonight and you want to see it and not me on the screen so I will be brief.

I have heard the talk about America’s need to use this moment to decrease our dependence on the burning of fossil fuels. That we if can put a man on the moon, certainly we can put science to work to develop ways to put oil, coal, and other fossil fuels into the dustbin of history.

The BP (BP stands for “Bad Planning”) disaster has quite literally placed a black mark on our environmental record for offshore drilling. Oil continues to spew from a pipe a mile underwater. Birds and turtles are already washing ashore covered in oil. Fish die by the score. Shrimpers, oystermen, and fishermen  can’t work. In all, it will cost billions in lost revenue and cleanup. This is the second largest spill into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a big mucking deal.

Therefore, I am declaring the affected coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida disaster areas and as such they are entitled to federal funds for help. I’ll be sending BP the bill to reimburse the costs.

Offshore oil drilling carries risks, but risk also comes with other forms of energy. Ever since humans climbed out of the trees and used fire to cook their food, warm themselves and ward off animals they’ve recognized the dual nature of energy: using it carried risks and rewards. Over time we learned to use other forms of energy. Through the ages, humankind has worked toward more getting more power from smaller packages until we succeeded in harnessing the power of the atom.

Let me be clear: getting free of petroleum by 2050 using renewable energy sources like wind and solar ain’t going to happen. Expecting renewable energy to grab a greater share of production over the next 30 to 40 years when it has declined over the past 60 years, despite tens of billions in subsidies, is wishful thinking.

Let’s consider wind turbines popping up on hillsides like toadstools. Every state and every country that has tried wind turbines has learned they do not lower carbon dioxide emissions while also being poor investments that hurt their economies. Wind requires massive subsidies and erases more than two jobs for every one wind power job created. That is a recipe for failure.

My fellow Americans, math, chemistry and the laws of physics are stubbornly non-partisan. They care not a whit whether you are conservative or liberal, right or left, green or tutti-frutti. The Energy Information Administration released projections on the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act” that passed in the House of Representatives last June; if our nation adopts the bill’s 25 percent renewable power electricity standard, the EIA estimated carbon dioxide reduction of a paltry 4.9 percent. This does not cut the mustard.

Natural gas and nuclear power plants are magnitudes more efficient than wind or solar, while emitting far less carbon than coal. So, in the future, we’re going to move toward natural gas and nuking the renewables. Nuclear energy is safe, reliable, and proven technology that works now, not a century from now. Let us invoke the ancient prophecy of Isaiah and “turn our swords into plowshares” and use nuclear energy for the good of our nation and our planet.

Thank you, God bless America, and Go Celtics!

The speech is a pipedream on my part; obviously the low power density approaches of wind, solar, and ethanol will reap huge subsidies in the wake of Blunder Petroleum’s accident. Robert Bryce, managing editor for the Energy Tribune sums up the choice this way: “(Political leaders) want to replace high power density sources that are dispatchable, reliable, and relatively low cost with low power density sources that are not dispatchable, highly variable, and high cost. This makes no sense. I’d call it insane but it’d be an insult to crazy people.”

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Reference and Source material:


Bentek Energy, “HOW LESS BECAME MORE…Wind, Power and Unintended Consequences in the Colorado Energy Market (http://ipams.org/wp-content/uploads/BENTEKStudy_How_Less_Became_More.pdf)
Congressional Budget Office. “How Policies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Affect Employment “


David L. Greene and Paul N. Leiby, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “Oil Independence: Realistic Goal or Empty Slogan?” (http://lugar.senate.gov/energy/links/commentary/08_greene_full.cfm)

Carl Mortishead and Angela Jameson, Times online, “Green energy levy would add £20 to bills”

C. le Pair & K. de Groot, “The impact of wind generated electricity on fossil fuel consumption” (http://www.clepair.net/windefficiency.html)

Hugh Sharman and Henrik Meyer, CEPOS: Center for Politiske Studier. “Wind Energy – The Case of Denmark.” (http://www.cepos.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Arkiv/PDF/Wind_energy_-_the_case_of_Denmark.pdf)

US Energy Information Administration, “Energy Market and Economic Impacts of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/hr2454/execsummary.html)

US Energy Information Administration, “International Energy Statistics.” (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=54&aid=2&cid=&syid=1989&eyid=2009&unit=TBPD)

Matt Ridley – A Rational Optimist

Last April I posted about how the earth had improved since the first Earth Day. At the end of the post is a poll about whether, after reading the post, the reader was optimistic, pessimistic, or ambivalent about the future. Overwhelmingly, people were (and apparently, are) pessimistic about the future of the earth. Matt Ridley, a former science writer for the Economist, has written a book, The Rational Optimist, saying that this overwrought litany of doom is misplaced because our ideas “have sex.”

BP – Beyond Perspective

Since man discovered fire, we have learned that any form of energy production holds risk. Fire cooked our food, lit the night so the wild animals stayed away, kept us warm, removed old vegetation at the end of the hunting season so that new growth would attract game in the coming spring. Fire also burned our skin and destroyed our homes. Every form of energy–wind, solar, hydro, nuclear and others–carries its unique downsides. Drilling carries the risk of oil spills. In BP’s case, oil spews from a pipe a mile underwater. Waterfowl and turtles wash ashore. Fish die by the score. Fishermen can’t work. In all, it is a mess that will cost billions in lost revenue and cleanup of catastrophic proportion.

Things look bad in the Gulf of Mexico. You might summarize editorials about British Petroleum’s (BP) Deepwater Horizon accident and spill: The gulf is dying! The gulf is dying!

No, it’s not. There have been bigger spills in the last 40 years. Oil has spilled into the ocean before: naturally, accidentally, and on purpose.

BP’s rig was still afire when the inevitable question about drilling on the continental shelf surfaced: Is it worth the risk? The short answer is yes.

The BP spill fiasco is a big gooey deal, yet if this spill behaves as all the other spills have, the setback will be temporary and not the end of the vegetation, wildlife, tourism, seafood, or anything else in the gulf. The states along the gulf coast should be back to normal within a year after experts plug the leak.

Consider the biggest spill in history: The 1991 Persian Gulf oil spill. Saddam Hussein ordered the destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields and had the valves opened at the oil terminal near Kuwait City, dumping between six and eight million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf. Greenpeace and others predicted “unprecedented” destruction of fragile ecological services and possibly large-scale extinctions. Similar fears are being voiced now. “We may well be living with the consequences of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for the rest of the 21st century,” wrote James Gibson in a recent Press-Democrat editorial. Professor Gibson, who teaches sociology at Cal State Long Beach, may be right about the social consequences. Yet if history holds he should miss the mark for the environmental consequences by 89 years. The effects shouldn’t last two years, let alone until 2100.

Just one year after the largest marine oil spill in human history, a team of researchers from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at Unesco found little lasting damage to the coral and fisheries in the affected area. The area’s animal life was in better shape than even the most optimistic pundits had predicted. The oil had evaporated, broken up and had been digested by microbes, or formed annoying bits of tar.

One year is a long time and damage is occurring, but the harm is not as lasting as the current frenzy would lead us to believe. In the meantime, President Obama has appointed a commission to investigate the cause of the spill and recommend fixes. The “National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling” will do what commissions always do: Convene, look solemn, hear testimony, write a report that no one will read because the effects will have already passed.

We’ve seen this drama before but, like my father who had dementia, have forgotten the ending. So we worry about the future. The answer to the question of whether we should drill or not drill is only nominally political. It’s primarily economics: Follow the money. We vote with our wallets. Now we might not allow the drilling in our backyard, but that hardly is the point. We need our energy fix. Get it from the North Sea or Nigeria, but get it. In the meantime, as we watch endless loops of oily birds, remember this: the gooey mess is not permanent.