Climate

I was just reading about Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla)and his attempts to get some order and sense into the effort to determine what exactly this Global Climate change means. On the one hand, most environmentalists and other people easily persuaded by advertizing, claim that current evidence of calving glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland "prove" that the earth is warming. And neither Senator Inhofe, nor yours truly, are disputing that evidence.
What we are reluctant to do is: to assume that those occurences are ipso facto the result of man-caused activities. We dispute simply that anyone really has enough correlative and reliable evidence that for instance, glaciers sliding faster and dropping some of their loads into the ocean are exclusively the result of mankind's puny energy output into our earth environment.
There are massive energy exchanges within our solar system that we do not understand enough to know their specific effects on our earth and on top of that their are additional energy variables beyond our immediate solar system that may well have their own impact on our little, precious globe.
We do know that historically there have been several colder as well as hotter periods, long before mankind could produce enough CO2 to do any harm. But we don't even know the exact causes of those temperature variations.
So rather than politicize this poorly understood phenomenon we should combine and concentrate our efforts to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of what is really going on. And we may not be able to do this persuasively yet. But the action word here is persuasive.
And that is really what Senator Inhofe is trying to accomplish. That's a tall order, particularly when there are such well funded and media supported organizations with personal agendas that brook no disagreement with their belief that humanity is causing this warming. While they may well represent a well-meaning effort to save us from our own follies, it is more likely a political ploy providing employment for a lot of dedicated envoronmentalist types, who do not question what they are told and just go out to promote the party line.
But that sort of effort hardly deserves the name of serious business.
It is interesting to recall that some of the "older" promotors of today's global warming, like Jeremy Rifkin, were just as vocal in the 60-ies and 70-ies about global cooling.
That does not provide a level of comfort when one considers the serious options available to tackle a mammoth problem such as adequate global energy supplies.
In my opinion we should encourage really knowledgeable people to keep measuring and analyzing global data that have a bearing on this topic and from time to time we should hear their progress explained lucidly and without political overtones or personal bias.
Then we decide what we need to do, if anything.

ENERGY

7/9/06

ENERGY II

People worry about energy availability. Well they might and with the understanding that we are concerned with adequate energy availability in the form and shape we need to fuel cars, planes, fireplaces, electric stoves and lights, etc.

During the past 150 years or so, with the discovery, processing and distribution of petroleum products, the development of electric power and light, the much more efficient use of our large coal reserves and finally our development of nuclear power, it became possible to change and vastly improve the world’s life styles in many countries. We have literally made day out of night whenever we want and thus extended the useful length of the day which in turn has had a major impact on our modern way of life that we have grown so unashamedly fond of. And rightfully so, in many respects.

The companies that have built our whole energy infrastructure, except for the nuclear portion, have done so with great skill, determination and private money.

Since the onset of the wars in the Middle East and now also the unrest in Nigeria, not to forget the radicals in South America, many of our politicians, instead of keeping their cool and a dignified united national front, make public caricatures of themselves by lambasting our current Administration on the one hand for wanting to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, with private money, (all of 2000 acres out of a total of 1.5 million acres, or the equivalence of 2 acres out of 1500) because allegedly it would destroy the surrounding pristine wilderness (it won’t), while on the other hand the Government promotes, with public money, the building of thousands of awkward, marginally useful windmills in places where they are very obtrusive and really ruining the landscape as well as certain animal species.

What the above might suggest to those of us seeing through the obvious, while for the time being ignoring the many nay-sayers and perennial do-nothing-crowd, is that we are, as a country, very capable of creating new and different and probably much more efficient, less polluting modes of transportation and energy use and all that without the government telling us what to do. How’s that?

Well, the companies that today provide us with gasoline, diesel fuel, propane gas, electricity and coal are a major national asset. Those companies are our real experts. Not the government. !! And they deserve to be treated accordingly.

These companies are and for more than a hundred years have been in the business of producing energy in forms that are useful to all of us and all our needs. What’s more, our wonderful capitalistic system is at work here and as public companies they have stockholders who expect those companies to continue to exist for a very long time to come and pay dividends. They are more than capable to handle the energy issues that confront us, as they have so splendidly done already for over a 100 years. But they should not be fettered or handcuffed by the government under one excuse or another. Admittedly, there is the occasional oil spill or refinery mishap or a train that derails or an airplane that crashes. But that’s no more reason to demonize an industry than it would be to demonize average Americans because they produce in the order of 40,000 fatal road accidents every year. It is part of life, not done intentionally, these things happen as a consequence of the billions and billions of actions people take every day doing what they are doing and then sometimes we goof, sometimes fatally. But what we don’t need is for certain self-serving politicians to exploit these kinds of unfortunate events to advance their personal career agendas.

We need politicians who will study these events, with malice towards none, to determine what the government could do, if anything, to possibly reduce accidents or other general problems. But they should not start the blame game every time there is some untoward event catching everyone’s attention for a moment and then handing out more edicts and court orders for the companies to pay huge fines while thumping their chests in front of TV cameras.

Hence, to guarantee our energy future, our political leadership as well as our legislatures would be well advised to get out of the way of those who do the real work in the world. Instead of wanting to impose excess profits’ taxes, they should express their hope that the industry use its current enhanced profits wisely to ensure long-term energy availability which will require enormous investments for many years. The Administration has every right to insist that the companies respect the environments they operate in and as far as I can tell, by and large they do so. The tenor should be supportive, not adversarial like it so often is today.

Today, too many of our politicians do not seem to understand that it is our capitalistic society that has made our modern mode of life possible. To me it is one of the greatest gifts western mankind has bestowed on itself and today is copied more and more, even by countries that until recently preferred to behead a capitalist rather than give him room to do his thing. So we must be doing something right. Why then are so many of our citizens and a goodly number of politicians so anti-capitalistic that they think like monopolistic communists and believe only the government has the answers? Why don’t they look at history instead !!!

In my view, the great motivator for society is its natural tendency for man and his creations, such as his industrial support structure, to stay alive and focused on the efforts of all of us to try to live better and more prosperous lives in the years to come.
A little guidance from a mature government structure may at times be beneficial to this end but let’s keep government out of our lives as much as humanly possible. After all, it is the biggest single cost item on our national budget!!

The government should set appropriate and acceptable rules of the game in close concert with industry, nationally if not internationally. But it most certainly should not do what is now happening in Russia with their new government monopoly in the energy field.

We need to realize that our primary energy and manufacturing industries are very basic, complex, international big business operations requiring highly sophisticated technologies, huge capital investments and supremely qualified people at all levels to run such enterprises. Virtually every large oil company needs to operate in many countries in the world, not a few of which have quite different ideas about how to run a business than we do, Yet we have to deal with all of them, because most of the crude oil is located there.Therefore, any American company able to play in this sandbox needs to be able to make deals that they consider best for themselves , their customers and our country, without being “Monday-morning quarterbacked” by the media or anyone else in the public arena just out of spite or to make trouble for the country.

We also need to keep in mind the fact that while the world’s population tripled during the past 100 years or so, the US population essentially quadrupled. With most of our people living in urban and suburban locations today, any serious and ongoing interruption of basic needs, like food, power, water and fuel, would rapidly lead towards marshal law and worse. It does not take a lot of imagination to realize that without an adequate availability of today’s energy resources people would literally starve after a while, and our societies might well break up into roaming bands of gangsters and robbers searching for food and neighbor fighting neighbor.

Consequently we need to allow oil development in all areas of our national territory that show reasonable promise as hydrocarbon energy sources, for 3 reasons, i.e.: to give ourselves the necessary time to fully develop products capable of using alternative energy sources efficiently, secondly: to reduce our dependence on foreign oil supplies and thirdly to avoid a potential fatal collapse of our society because of short sighted thinking today.

Having said all this, it needs to be recalled that we have been inundated by the media about the fact that we, the world, will eventually run out of cheap non-renewable energy. That’s absolutely true, on the face of it.

But it is also terribly misleading, because it assumes, snidely, that we live in a static world and that the industry will uncharacteristically do nothing imaginative, so that we slowly but surely shall consume the last drop of oil in our big gas-guzzling cars and disintegrate as a civilization. And what is more insidious is our liberal political friends crying for the government to take charge of this impending doomsday scenario. That would almost make it a certainty. It would be too late anyway.

To sum up. What we should and must do, is to let those who really know about energy tell us in broad terms what needs to be done and, subject to proper vetting of their recommendations, tell them to get on with it.

A review of our energy options would not be complete without a clear understanding that our overall strategy for the future needs a mandate to go out full bore with renewed construction of many nuclear power plants. In order to switch the demand for many petroleum based operations and products to electric energy sources we need nuclear power plants and therefore time. In particular because we have already wasted many decades and done nothing. We have been listening far too long to incompetent and self-serving politicians and other prophets of fantasy-land persuasion, instead of following the advice of those Americans who know how to keep our country strong in all respects.

The alternative is most discouraging. Look at how we came to this irrational situation, where otherwise sane and reasonable people, have become fanatic about keeping our oil in the ground because supposedly it’s fouling the world. But that scenario is sure to really foul the world. Let’s not pay attention to them.

The above is meant to aid those who do not normally concern themselves very much with a basic topic like energy and suggest to them that continuing inaction is sure to make happen what we all want to avoid. We must get our collective act together and consequently strongly support our President and his administration in this.

God bless America.