Drill Baby Drill

The unintended consequences of the green revolution

Flcelloguy at English Wikipedia..

Evil may be evil, but it can have genius. In a Machiavellian move, Putin has virtually cornered the European energy market and hindered ours.

Russia’s #1 export, by a large margin (250 billion per year to 8 billion a year for wheat the #2 export), are energy-related products. If that’s what you have then that’s what you have to sell. Since it peaked in 2001, production of oil and natural gas in European countries has halved, and at the same time, power consumption has remained stable. That leaves a sizable void. Putin is not only responsible for filling the void, he helped create it.

Conservation and Choices

I learned a valuable lesson when I was a general contractor in California. From 2000 through 2017 when we moved to Florida, I’ve built some very energy-efficient homes. The one lesson I learned is that conservation is more about how you use something than how efficient it is. Leaving the lights on and running the air conditioning or heat to “comfortable” levels is going to result in a large bill. People, especially Americans, don’t roll this way. In Habits of the Heart, I explained how emotional decisions often override reality. For Americans and a good portion of the world with us, conserving energy is an oxymoron.

So, we can rule out cutting energy consumption, which leaves the question of where to get our energy from. Before we decide where to purchase it, we need to decide what we are going to buy to power our homes, vehicles, offices, stores, restaurants, street lights, and factories—or simply our lives.

This is where Habits of the Heart come into play or simply ideology versus intelligence.

There are three elephants in the room when it comes to power sources. One is the idealogical viewpoint that green energy solves all our problems. It doesn’t. Green energy should absolutely be pursued, but until we can deal with the embedded costs, both in hidden fossil fuel costs in manufacturing and shipping our green products, and then how to safely mine the raw materials and dispose of the products when their all too short life cycles end, we need to realize that green isn’t always green.

For example:

•  To manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. 

• Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. Used blades cannot be recycled. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

• Solar panels face many of the same issues.

In the rush to introduce new green products to the construction industry, huge mistakes were made, resulting in elements, some structural, failing. My problem with green energy is not the idea, it’s the rush forced by ideology. Get it right, then roll it out.

The second issue is the mistake that thinking anything with a battery is green. Aside from the embedded environmental costs, there is the question of where the energy to charge the battery comes from. I got into this in-depth in my post about electric vehicles. By reducing and eliminating nuclear energy (see the 3rd elephant), we are relying on fossil fuel (of which the majority are coal) sources to power our “clean” batteries.

Finally, on to the third elephant and third rail of power choices, nuclear energy. The Three Mile Island “Meltdown”, which was more of a scare than an incident, and a group of rock and rollers who popularized the No Nukes movement shortly thereafter, put a knife to the heart of the cleanest and cheapest energy source available to us. Like others, there are byproducts, but emissions directly related to climate change, which we are talking about here, are almost non-existent. If nuclear power were allowed to develop in the forty years since Three Mile Island we would have solved the safety and disposal issues.

Our American problem

In our ideological haste to adopt green measures we have crippled our domestic energy production and veered away from nuclear energy.

• The fuel produced scheduled to be delivered through the Keystone pipeline is still being produced, but rather than transporting it through the pipeline, it will be shipped via land and sea. Constructing the pipeline does impact the environment, but in the short term only. Tankers and trucks will run until the source dries up or there is a better fuel alternative.

• We have enough energy to be independent. Instead of increasing our own production, which is generally more environmentally sound than the countries we buy from, we chose to give other countries, many who are enemies, our dollars—and transport the fuel half-way around the world in the process

• Climate change is a global problem, but it is only visible to us when it is in front of our eyes. Though the impact on climate change is the same regardless of where emissions occur, we don’t want them in our backyards.

• We have to come to the understanding that oil doesn’t magically appear at our gas pumps It is extracted from the Earth somewhere. By increasing domestic production we can control the conditions with which it is produced.

The Russian Ploy

As shown above, Russia’s only real export is energy. Putin, knowing this, put several things in play to maximize Russian exports.

• Russia has doubled its nuclear energy production since 1992 and continues to grow the sector.

• Russia sponsored and paid for elements of the campaign to eliminate nuclear energy in Europe. The purpose of course was to sell its surplus of fossil fuels to the anti-nuke Europeans. Until the recent events in Ukraine, Germany was ready to decommission its nuclear plants.

The Answer

Invest in America. Stop importing and start drilling using the most environmentally sound practices available. Concurrently work on the sustainable issues, knowing we will find the answers and without rushing to roll out whatever is there in a short-sighted attempt to appear “Green”.

By filling our own needs ourselves we will no longer be at the mercy of the bad actors and subject to their whims. Domestic prices will stabilize and the Earth will benefit.