It's been a big couple of weeks for energy policy news. President Obama addressed the nation last Tuesday, giving an oval office address on the Gulf Coast oil spill. His speech had many detractors, but he did start to link the oil disaster to the creation of a green energy policy, a critical next stop in protecting our health and our planet. Yesterday, the CEO of BP, Tony Hayward, appeared before Congress to testify about the oil spill. He did not add much to the process of determining what really happened on the Deep Water oil rig when it exploded on April 20, but his appearance did stir up the usual controversy about the role of government versus industry in preventing or at least responding to environmental. And of course Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas added his conservative voice to the entire mess, accusing President Obama of 'shaking down BP' when he used his presidential powers to assure that the very flawed and complicit corporation set aside $20 billion to help with all aspects of cleaning up the environmental disaster they have created.
The oil spill and questions about US energy policy have certainly received a lot of press in the past few days. But what's missing from this discussion? The most important message: a green energy policy is a healthy policy.
As a physician and a climate change activist, I have the gravest climate change and health facts etched in my mind. Our planet has warmed nearly 1 degree Celsius since the 1970's. We have already exceeded the extremely dangerous 350 ppm greenhouse gas emission threshold. Most critically, 150, 000 people die annually from the health effects of climate change. With the droughts, floods, heat waves and infectious disease risks caused by climate change already unleashed upon humanity, climate change is no longer a looming public health disaster. It's a public health disaster that has arrived. The US needs to launch a huge green energy initiative immediately in order to protect the health of Americans and people all over the globe.
A large decrease in US greenhouse gas emissions requires many moving parts. We need to reduce our consumption of oil, gas and coal. We need to reconstruct our national electrical grid and start to replace our dirty, dangerous and deadly coal plants with green energy driven by solar, water and wind power. We need to make the connection between fossil fuels and their human and planetary health consequences, and we need political leaders with the vision to help us jump start our 21st century green energy economy.
How does the Gulf oil spill play into this? This deadly, destructive, messy, expensive massive accident may have a silver lining. President Obama can turn this "burning water moment" into an opportunity to create a real green energy economy. He can say to Tony Hayward something like this: "Mr. Hayward, in addition to setting aside $20 billion to help clean up the Gulf Coast and compensate men and women who have lost their livelihood in the wake of this massive accident, I'd like you to start construction of 5 wind turbine plants and 5 solar panel plants in the Gulf Coast area. You see, the US must respond to the public health crisis brought on by climate change by decreasing our greenhouse gas emissions. And hiring people who can no longer fish or drive tour boats or work in the tourist industry until you restore the Gulf Coast to work in green energy industry instead will help jump start our green energy economy. This represents the best compensation you can give to the local folks most affected by the oil spill and to the rest of the world."
This is the kind of silver lining our green energy future and the health of our planet needs now.
Though I work for Physicians for Social Responsibility, this blog post represents my personal views.
John Robbins: The Choices Before Us
Andy Borowitz: Stephen Hawking: Aliens 'No Longer Interested' in Invading Earth
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons: Obama and the Oil Spill: In the Abstract
Oil spill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louisiana Oil Spill 2010 PHOTOS: Gulf Of Mexico Disaster Unfolds
News Analysis - Gulf Oil Spill Is Bad, but How Bad? - NYTimes.com
Gulf oil spill: BP says 'top kill' a failure, moves to new ...
BP CEO Tony Hayward 'too busy' meet with oil tycoons, goes AWOL amid Gulf ...
Oil Spill Gets Star Power: Justin Bieber, Sting to Headline Larry King's Telethon
Since each chapter is relatively short, they can be broken down into bit-sized time frames for those in need of time management. In one setting the course would take about 3 hours.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/sites/all/themes/cm/cm-crashcourse.php?height=560&width=760
1. There are >3 million miles of paved asphalt highways in the US, alone. On average only 3% of a barrel of oil is tar. Yet that 3% paved all the those roads. Problem: to get that 3% we still have to pump the other 97%. Some roads are concrete. In its manufacturing cement is heated to 2800 degrees using fossil fuels. The lava flowing from Hawaii's volcano is 2200 degrees, 600 degrees less. We cannot just switch from tar to concrete in paving roads. It's too costly to taxpayers. Think about the is the next time you take a long driving trip: How many tankers and barrels of oil did it take to pave all those miles of interstate highway and what will we going to replace that asphalt with?
2. Oil isn't just energy. It's also most ever product you consume, including many of the pharmaceuticals you prescribe, including aspirin. http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm and http://www.priweb.org/ed/pgws/uses/vitamins.html
3. Consider the 85 million barrels of oil the modern world requires each day. Since I know you've seen 55-gallon steel drums used as trashcans I'm going to convert barrels into steel drums (see followup post)
* 42 gallons equals one oil barrel
* A 55 gallon steel drum is 3 feet tall by 22 inches wide
* A mile is 5,280 feet
* The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles
* Speed of sound 768 mph
Using those numbers I'll convert 42gal barrels into 55gal steel drums to construct a pipeline
(85,000,000bbl x 42gal) / 55gal = 64,909,090 fifty-five gallon steel drums
(64,9090,090 x 3ft) / 5280ft = 36,880 mile long pipeline
36,880 / 24,901 = 1.48 or a pipeline stretching 1 1/2 times around the earth every day
(36,880 / 24hr) / 768mph = Mach 2 or twice the speed of sound the oil would need to flow to replace the 85 M/bbl volume being consumed every day.
(36,880 x 365days) / 24,901miles = 540 times you could encircle the earth every year with steel drums.
Now, try replacing those volumes form corn oils and ethanol and still feed the planet with its growing population. It'll take a lot of ecological destruction to get the needed land in the production of biomass.
There isn't enough ag land in the US to replace gasoline with corn ethanol.
BTW the fertilizers and pesticides to grow those biomass comes from petroleum. Petroleum replaced guano that got depleted.
People put hopes in alga to manufacture bio-fuels. It can be done small scale but is it in actually green for CO2?
(Next reply)
At present we are depleting our fossil fuels reserves and burning it for fuel. If we could switch today to the burning of alga/biomass instead of petroleum what would happen to CO2 concentrations, assuming burn rate remains constant? CO2 concentrations would still increase at the same rate.
The only way you could reduce atmospheric carbon increases is to burn a fuel with little or no carbon. Natural gas is one such source. NG is lower in carbon then bio-fuels.
But, you might be thinking, burning biomass is carbon neutral. A scorched earth is also carbon neutral; you've simply converted all the biomass carbon sinks into CO2. Assuming the climatologist are correct about the 50-200 year lifetime for atmospheric CO2 it logically follows that instead of depleting fossil reserves logic dictates we would have to deplete the planet's overall biomass reserves.
I'd love to put all this into one post but I keep running out of word allotment.
(Next post)
These reminds me of obsession of "science" on the age old Philosophers' stone. The philosophers' stone is a legendary alchemical substance, supposedly capable of turning base metals, especially lead, into gold; it was also sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality. It was the most sought-after goal in Western alchemy, meditated upon by alchemists like Sir Isaac Newton, Nicolas Flamel, and Frater Albertus. The discovery of the philosopher's stone was known as the Great Work.
Today's philosophers' stone are windmills, solar panels, ethanol, and electric cars. And these have proven as elusive as turning base minerals into gold was for the ancients. We hear leftist speak of these items as an elixir of economic life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly achieving a carbon free world. "Green" energy is the central symbol of perfection, enlightenment, and bliss for the world. And when it is pointed out that no where have these actually worked without massive government subsidies, we are told that if we can go to the moon, we certainly can do this. No mention is ever made that since we went to the moon we've not found a cure for cancer or even the common cold.
The solution is for us to use our voices to support policies that shift us to a viable clean and healthy renewable energy economy. The defeat of the Murkowski ammendment shows that even in the face of big oil interests, our voices count. Using our voices and votes is the greatest gift we can give our children and grandchildren, ensuring them a world in which they can thrive.
The preeminent UK science writer Matt Ridley, formerly an editor of The Economist and author of the best-selling Genome and other books, has long upheld the politically correct canons of his trade. But in his new book, The Rational Optimist, he has finally exhausted his patience with the environmental movement and the rest of the economic left. The cause of his sudden and violent disillusionment is the collapse of global warming science, which he and the Economist have long gullibly accepted but which Ridley has now discovered to be so deeply flawed as to rise to the level of fraud.
His more deserving targets (I think) are the dubious "green" technologies with high--often disastrous--environmental costs: ethanol in particular, but also solar, wave & wind power. He's not opposed to the latter energy options in principal, but shows they're unlikely to replace hydrocarbons anytime soon. Most of these alternative energy "cures" are not only environmentally worse than the "disease" (fossil fuel), but their their high costs will be borne in heavy disproportion by the world's poor.
http://aztextpress.wordpress.com
How many roads must a man drive down, before you call him a man?
How many seas must a pelican sail, before she can sleep in clean sand?
Yes and how many times must oil be spilled, before it is forever banned?
Refrain:
The answer my friend, is flowin’ in the gulf,
The answer is flowing in the gulf.
Yes and how many years can an oil rig exist, before it fails you and me?
Yes and how many years can some people exist, in a world of dying seas?
Yes and how many many times can you turn your head, and pretend that you just don’t see?
(Refrain)
Yes and how many times must a man look up, before he can see a clear sky?
Yes and how many ears must one man have, before he can hear seabirds cry?
Yes and how many deaths will take till he knows, that too many creatures have died?
(Refrain)
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A free gift to the world, sing and spread widely.....
Credit for inspiration to Bob Dylan, and credit for the subject matter to Big Oil.