The House of Representatives recently passed new energy
legislation and it is pending in the Senate. Led by Congressman
Richard Pombo, our very own elected representative, the House
energy bill is presented as the link to a
“million new jobs.”
The House of Representatives recently passed new energy legislation and it is pending in the Senate. Led by Congressman Richard Pombo, our very own elected representative, the House energy bill is presented as the link to a “million new jobs.” (Source Pombo)
It is my opinion that this bill ranks high among the most ill-conceived, short-sighted and generally misguided pieces of legislation in recent years. In the long run, the policies that this bill hopes to enact could do as much damage to our society as anything done by external forces .
This is the first of a series of three columns in which I plan to address why I am willing to make such a strong statement to show why environmentalists lost this battle before it began, and then to outline what I believe should be done to correct the problem. Since these columns will be published over a period of several weeks, you may have time to read Jared Diamond’s latest book, “Collapse”. I will reference it more than once.
Our media does a better job of taking something interesting and making it sound important than it does of finding a way to take something important and make it interesting. From the Today Show to the latest update on Blake/Peterson/Jack son trials we are given entertainment rather than important events. Energy is never made interesting. I can only hope to make it interesting enough for you to take responsibility for your own energy use without becoming overly alarmist and losing my audience.
Diamond’s premise in “Collapse” is that societies decline, even catastrophically collapse, not because of external changes but because of the society’s failure in dealing with those changes. He made a point of Norse Greenland where the inhabitants, faced with climate changes, stubbornly retained their European farmer lifestyle and starved to death while their Inuit neighbors thrived.
The key to understanding our society’s future is energy. There is only so much and we are using it faster than we are finding new supplies. Energy use equates to standard of living. If you plot the two, as does Pombo’s committee, you find that Gross National Product (GNP) per capita is high in the United States matching our energy use per capita.
The United States contains 4.6 percent of the world’s population, yet consumes 26 percent of the world’s oil. According to Diamond, for the third world to advance to the standard of living of the United States, it would require 12 times the current world energy consumption.
Now here is where I try your patience by citing statistics. To quote a Peak Oil Primer (http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php) the rate of oil “production,” meaning extraction and refining (currently about 83 million barrels/day), has grown in most years over the last century, but once we go through the halfway point of all reserves, production becomes ever more likely to decline, hence “peak.” Peak Oil means not “running out of oil,” but “running out of cheap oil.” Our political leaders are failing to deal with the fact of “peak oil.”
Oil production in the United States peaked in 1970/71. The discovery of new oil fields in the world peaked in the 1960s. More than 50 oil producing countries find production now in decline, including the large North Sea fields. We will find new fields but they will be increasingly costly to develop.
According to a Pombo press release, the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve will yield 10.4 billion barrels of oil. That is enough to supply the entire world at current rates for no more than 130 days. It would supply the U.S. needs (at 2003 levels) for 520 days. The impact of ANWR oil is greatly exaggerated.
This is not just about oil. We have to consider natural gas as well, our other major source of hydrocarbon energy. Our personal use of natural gas is primarily for heating – hot water for the bath and a warm home in winter. Other uses are not so obvious. A Canadian government publication states that over 50 percent of the fertilizer produced depends on natural gas as a feedstock and that this consumes 7 percent of all of the natural gas used in Canada.
I find the current House bill to be objectionable on three counts. The first is that its intended result is continued economic growth without making the structural changes to our economy necessary to ensure that this growth is sustainable. Economic growth in other countries requires that their energy use must increase, especially India and China. The intent of this bill is to ensure domestic economic growth at the expense of non-industrialized countries, who will never be able to close that gap. This will only further isolate America and create greater resentment. Continuing to fuel growth through increasing energy consumption is bad policy.
Second, this bill ties job creation and U.S. economic expansion directly to drilling in ANWR in a manner that is just not true. When I read Pombo’s “million jobs” statement my personal BS meter went off. Using a jobs number to justify drilling in ANWR is just hype and spin. The same jobs, if valid, could be produced by any similar investment in energy production. At some time it will become necessary to drill in ANWR but this is not the time to do it. When there is only one more known major source of petroleum in the U.S., you hold that in reserve for when there is no other option. The proposal to drill in ANWR now says that we are going to tap the keg one last time, enjoy the feeling, but wake up tomorrow with a hangover for which Pombo has no magic pill.
The third reason that the house bill is objectionable is the fact that it fails to target adequate expenditures in those areas of development (also generating jobs) that will ensure enough energy to maintain our current standard of living. While hydrogen has been touted as the solution for transportation, it still requires the expenditure of more energy to extract, store and transport the hydrogen than you get out of it. While we have at times looked at oil shale, it is still more expensive to develop that resource than it is to continue the use of high cost petroleum.
We need to accept the fact that the time of cheap oil is over. Approximately two-thirds of domestic petroleum use goes to transportation. Never again will the price of gasoline fall to the levels that we have enjoyed as recently as the early 1990s. The Senate may find a way to wash away the hype from Pombo’s energy policy blunder. We need a workable plan and so far it has not been forthcoming.
“I find I have a great lot to learn – or unlearn. I seem to know far too much and this knowledge obscures the really significant facts, but I am getting on.” – Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
