The World Will Not Need Liquid Fuels in 20 Years
In the July 23, 2012, edition of CQ Weekly, on page 1483, Randy Udall, brother of Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), is quoted as saying, regarding the potential for development of environmentally unsound oil shale development, “underlying it is this question that everyone is asking: ‘Well, where is the world going to get its liquid fuels 20 years from now?’” The truth of the matter is: there is no reason we should be using liquid fuels 20 years from now.
Thanks to the work of Mark Jacobson, of Stanford, and Mark Delucci, of UC Davis, we know it is possible to power the entire global economy without carbon-based fuels, by 2030, using technologies already in existence, and in use, in 2009. We also know it is possible to do this without spending more than we will have to spend to upgrade and maintain the existing energy infrastructure, designed to deliver fossil energy to consumers and industry.
James Hansen Pushes Fee & Dividend in NY Times Piece
From James Hansen’s landmark article in today’s New York Times: a resounding endorsement of Carbon Fee and Dividend:
“We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.”
Spread the word. Ask those you know who care about the environment, the security of our democracy, and the future of our families and communities, to read this article and to share it: nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html
Obama Suspends Tar Sands Pipeline Project, Pending Review
Amid intense and gathering pressure from the grassroots to the state government of Nebraska, to a national coalition of activist organizations, tens of thousands of demonstrators and an intensifying drumbeat from leading scientists, Nobel laureates and concerned public officials, Pres. Barack Obama this week ordered the suspension of the Keystone XL pipeline project. The pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico, for export to other nations, and would run through some of the most sensitive and important fresh water systems in the US.
The pipeline’s potential threat to the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest fresh water fossil aquifer in North America, and the source of water for most of the agriculture in the Great Plains—”breadbasket to the world”—, sparked grave concern among scientists, environmentalists, farmers and public officials in the region. The state of Nebraska, including its Republican governor, had fought for the project’s rejection, as it could cause serious lasting contamination to the sensitive Sand Hills region, the Ogallala Aquifer and other fresh water systems.
Questions had been raised as to the legitimacy of building an oil pipeline to run through such a sensitive area, and about the environmental risk review being conducted by a consulting firm whose top client is the pipeline operator itself.
There is no known way to close off a leak or clean up a spill in an underground aquifer, and the same operator had a record 12 oil spills from another, simpler pipeline, in just one year, in 2010. The catastrophe stemming from BP’s inability to close the Macondo well, when it blew out 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, has worried public officials that no project with high risk of contamination could go forward without a proven plan for response and cleanup.
The decision to call for a fully independent, entirely fresh review of the project puts the decision off till at least the year 2013, and many believe such costly fossil fuel projects may be untenable by then, especially if the environmental review turns up a more skeptical assessment of the project’s safety for environmental and human health.
Energy Prices Constant for 5 Decades, Oil Out-of-control Expensive
Americans pay about the same as they did in 1960 for most forms of energy, says this infographic produced by the home energy audit folks at WellHome. Except for oil, which is now on average even more crazy-expensive than it was during the oil crisis of the 1970’s, when people were ready to bash each others’ heads in to be next in line at what few stations still had fuel to sell. That’s not reflected as much in the price of gas as you might expect, in part because the scale of this graph minimizes swings in gasoline prices, and also because there isn’t a one to one relationship between oil and gas prices. (Gas is also influenced by the costs of refining it and getting it to market.)
China plans carbon-trading pilot scheme
BEIJING—China will introduce a pilot scheme forcarbon emissions trading and gradually develop a national market as the world’s largest polluter seeks to reduce emissions and save energy, state media said.
China will promote the market’s development through “punitive” electricity tariffs on power-intensive industries and other new policies, Xie Zhenhua, a top climate official, was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying on Sunday.
(Source: economictimes.com)
Fossil Energy: Hidden Costs Threaten America’s Future
As civilization evolves, and science advances, and democracy effects positive change in favor of human dignity and freedom, one paradigm replaces another, and we become better at managing the problems that threaten to destabilize the human environment. There was a time when authority could use command and control to maintain order, for a time, but in our democratic and informational age, that paradigm is as primitive and unworkable as it is unjust, and our problems demand subtler, more values-infused solutions.
As the subtitle of a recent Economist report on closed industries in Italy says it, “Cartels that make life cushy for insiders exact a heavy toll on everyone else”. There is no real way around this: to profit from doing business well and providing excellent quality of manufacture and service is one thing; to pad one’s profits by coordinating market strategies with close competitors that join with one to form an exclusive cartel, boxing out the influence of stakeholders is quite another.
(Source: independentsofprinciple.com)
Texas Fracking Industry Using Three Times Total US Daily Personal Water Use
Enron Oil and Gas (EOG) will use 3700 gallons of water per minute to process frack sand at their proposed mine in North Texas. According to the permit, the EOG frack sand mine can produce up to a maximum of 150 tons of finished frack sand per hour.
Fun with fracking social math:
- 2500 tons is approximately 303 African elephants.
- At 150 tons per hour, it will take 17 hours and 3,774,000 million gallons of water to process 2500 tons of frack sand. (Now you have enough sand to frack one well.)
- A Barnett Shale gas well takes from 2.5 to 9 million gallons of water to frack.
- There are approximately 15,000 wells in the Barnett Shale.
- If each well used only the minimum amount of water, 2.5 million gallons, and only 2500 tons of frack sand, the associated water cost for fracking one well would be 6,274,000 million gallons.
- That’s a minimum of 94,110,000,000 gallons of water and 3,750,000 tons of sand (454,545 African elephants) used to frack the approximately 15000 Barnett Shale gas wells.
- According to the US Geological Survey, a person uses 80 to 100 gallons of water a day.
- Using the higher number of 100 gallons of water a day, that is enough water for 941,100,000 people for one day.
- That’s enough water for 31,370,000 people for one month.
- That’s enough water for 2,578,368 people for one year.
- That’s enough water for 36,834 people for an entire generation (70 years).
- That’s almost enough water for all of Cooke County for 70 years.
- That’s enough water for the entire 6,500,000 population of Dallas for 145 days.
Pipeline Rupture Pours Oil into Yellowstone River
The rupture of a pipeline in Montana has caused at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil to spill into the pristine Yellowstone River, raising concerns about the tar sands pipeline planned to pass through the most important fossil aquifer in North America. The spill is precisely the kind of irreversible and unnecessary environmental disaster conservationists, farmers, energy reformers and local activists across the Great Plains seek to prevent.
The initial reports cited Exxon-Mobil spokespeople explaining that only a few hundred barrels of oil had been released into the river, and that the multinational was bringing in top cleanup experts from across the nation to do the most advanced cleanup work possible. But yesterday the news came that the spill had in fact released at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River, threatening pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, and human health, across several states.
Exxon-Mobil now says its expert cleanup effort is being hampered by Mother Nature. The takeaway seems to be that, more than twenty years after the catastrophic Exxon-Valdez spill, the oil giant has used its routine megaprofits to produce no viable cleanup strategy. It also appears there was insufficient maintenance to an insufficiently constructed pipeline, and a near total disregard for the potential impact on the natural and human environment. [Keep reading…]
(Source: thehotspring.net)
Carbon Emissions Overload, by the Numbers
Coal requires 83 pounds of fuel to generate 1 million BTU, which produces 227 pounds of CO2 emissions.
Wood requires 156 pounds of fuel to generate 1 million BTU, which produces 195 pounds of CO2 emissions.
Oil requires 52 pounds of fuel to generate 1 million BTU, which produces 164 pounds of CO2 emissions.
Natural gas requires 50 pounds of fuel to generate 1 million BTU, which produces 117 pounds of CO2 emissions.
According to the Energy Information Administration, the US economy produced/consumed 100.1 QUADRILLION BTU in 2008. (1 quadrillion is 1 billion times 1 million. That 0.1 is 100 TRILLION BTU.)
There are roughly 3,400 BTU to one kiloWatt-hour, in case you’re counting…
Oil Subsidies are Not Smart Spending
Oil as a combustible fuel is a 19th-century improvement on the 18th-century paradigm of burning coal to produce steam to run industrial machinery. The efficiency and portability of carbon-based fuels, in terms of the built-in energy they can store and which is released when they are burnt, has long been the driving factor in their popularity as an energy source. But new technologies are now making it possible to produce large amounts of portable energy sustainably, with none of the atmospheric damage resulting from the burning of carbon-based fuels.
(Source: independentsofprinciple.com)
