| An Inconvenient Truth: A Realistic Assessment of the Energy Crises |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|10:54 pm] |
Before going too far I feel inclined to type up a brief assessment of the situation, to add context and to make certain everyone is on the same page.
For many decades a question has been repeatedly been put onto the hands of lawmakers. Do we expand our infrastructure, drill for more oil, build more power-plants, refine the equipment we already have, or do we instead focus on preserving our environment and making certain it's a pleasant place to live? For the most part, we've repeatedly chosen the latter, and for the most part, it was the right decision. For all the benefits of industrialization, some of its excesses have been harmful to the world around us, and reigning in some of those excesses was by in large a good idea.
However, while the excesses of industrialization have been wrought with danger, so have the excesses of environmentalism. As the word's population grew, our capacity to provide fuel and energy has not, and now that increasingly large portions of the worlds population are becoming affluent for the very first time, we're finding ourselves with too much demand and not enough supply. The problem is exacerbated by other factors, government taxation, tariffs, mandatory use of bio-fuels that cost more than the gasoline they are replacing. Not to mention foreign oil cartels, oil companies that are not aggressive enough in weeding out bottlenecks in their supply line, and automobiles that do not make good enough use of the fuels they run on.
Normally, all of this would simply be called a political, or economic problem, but it is about to go beyond that. As the price of fuel and energy goes up, it creates an inflationary effect on nearly every market on earth. The prices of clothes, tools, and most importantly food, increases regardless of whether a region is capable of affording these higher prices or not. When the price of food goes up in poor, less stable countries people start dying, starving to death. At first this only effects the people with the most tenuous grasp on life, the people who are most likely to go without enough food to begin with. However, as prices go up, it begins to affect more and more, and what once only effected a minority, soon effects millions of people.
Such tragedy in my mind is not acceptable, especially when we're fully capable of stopping it.
The most effective way to delay this tragedy in the first place, would be to cease the use of Bio-fuels altogether, barring that a temporary reduction in the mandated use of fuels like Ethanol is at the very least warranted. To further drive down costs gas taxes can be suspended, reducing the price of gasoline by several dollars in some countries, and by nearly a dollar in some states. As a further measure tariffs on importing bio-fuels like Ethanol from countries such as Brazil can be removed to act as a slight deflationary measure on food crops.
None of this is a permanent solution, but it would give us time. Time to improve our ability to produce bio-fuels, time to build new power plants, to build refineries and improve our supply line. Most importantly, it gives us time to drill.
This is a very touchy subject for some. Many people simply cannot stomach the thought of drilling. Increasing our supply of fossil fuels however, is the only conceivable way of truly reducing the price of gasoline this decade. Improving the millage of automobiles would help some, however in any given year only 8% of all automobiles are taken off the road. With that figure in mind, even if all automobiles in the United States were to switch over to hybrid or electric cars tomorrow, it'd still take 12.5 years to replace all the gas guzzlers on the road. As it stands, it'll be years before the majority of all new cars sold are hybrids, and even assuming it happens by 2012, we still would not see an end to purely gasoline powered cars in America until the year 2024, sixteen years from now. Even then purely gasoline vehicles will persist in other countries, in South America, Africa, India, and China. China would especially be problematic, as its citizens will soon become affluent enough to start buying their own cars, but not affluent enough to buy more energy efficient cars that cost more. This is only a rough estimate, but if it took America until 2024 to get rid of all purely gasoline powered cars, then it'd take China at least until 2034 if not longer. So like it or not, we're going to be using gasoline for a long long time. While switching to more efficient vehicles is definitely a long term solution, the only thing that is going to have a real prominent deflationary effect on worldwide prices this decade would be additional drilling.
However, additional drilling and additional refineries do not necessarily need to be harmful to the environment. It may require strong arming, but new refineries can be built that're far cleaner then the old ones, and the old ones can be shut down as new refineries replace and surpass their capacity. Oil drilling in and of itself is not that dirty to begin with. Oil drilling rigs are sometimes ran right next to thriving fields of wheat and corn, if the process was really that dirty that would be impossible. Of course, accidents like the Valdez oil spill are always possible, however steps can be taken to mitigate the potential danger to acceptable margins.
Biofuel production can be improved upon to take advantage of organic substances that would otherwise go to waste. While this would not lower the price of fuel it would be cheaper then using corn or wheat to create ethanol, and it would not directly interfere with food prices. Producing all of our fuel in this matter is of course impossible for the time being. We simply do not have methods efficient enough to do it with the amount of space we have available in America. If however bio-fuels can offset five percent of America's fuel consumption, it could effectively allow the United States to cut oil imports from Saudi Arabia to nearly half, which would have a major effect on both security, and global fuel prices.
The ultimate end all solution to the oil shortage however, is most undoubtedly electric cars. To this end I would propose building new power plants to keep the cost of electricity low. Preferably Hydroelectricity, tidal, wind, geo-thermal and of course Nuclear Power Plants. The construction of new Nuclear plants would undoubtedly unnerve many, however unlike coal plants they do not pollute the air, the waste can be reprocessed, greatly reducing the level and length of their radioactivity, and they have the benefit of being usable anywhere providing there is a sufficient body of water nearby. Unfortunately we'll have to put up with coal powered plants for a long time, despite the fact that they're dirty and that coal could be put to better use. Even if we closed all coal powered power plants in America, they would remain the predominant method of power generation in many other countries, in large part due to their relatively simple construction, and low cost. Due to these circumstances, it's unlikely that we'll see an end to greenhouse gas emissions anytime soon, and although it's unclear how much of an effect they have on global temperatures, steps will need to be taken to preserve Earth's current climate.
Geoengineering is a term you'll likely be hearing a lot over the next twenty years. In short it is a newer field of science that deals with methods which might be used to manipulate and control the earth's climate. Amongst the ideas currently being floated around, the one that would have the most immediate effect, and allow for the greatest amount of precision control, would involve building a series of mirrors orbiting earth to reflect away sunlight and cool Earth as needed. Alternatively reflecting light to earth could be used to raise temperatures should another ice-age ever occur. Another method for cooling the earth would be to fertilize the worlds oceans and promote the growth of Algae. Doing so would presumably have a cleaning effect on the world's atmosphere and should in turn nullify greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over time. While this later solution would not be as immediate or as precise as using orbital mirrors, it does have the benefit of being far cheaper to carry out, and would presumably have a positive effect on our oceans ecosystem.
All this being said, this is not a simple problem, and it's likely to be a huge issue for many years to come. I believe we'll get through it, but it is most definitely going to be tough. |
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